Building-integrated thermally driven cooling technologies could be considered as alternatives to conventional vapor compression-based systems to reduce space cooling consumption in hot and humid climates. Among the technologies, Solid Desiccant Cooling (SDC) systems do not require the temperature of the heat input to be as high as other technologies. The lower temperature requirement allows extracting heat from the outlet air of Photovoltaic Thermal (PV/T) that is optimized for generating electricity rather than increasing outlet air temperature. On occasional hours where the outlet air temperature is too low to be useful, an auxiliary heater (AH) is deployed to meet the required regeneration temperature. This study develops an integrated design workflow for the PV/T-assisted SDC system aimed at maximizing electrical generation while minimizing AH energy consumption. The workflow includes developing a baseline energy model for the integrated system, performing a sensitivity analysis to select influential design parameters for optimization, and conducting a multi-objective optimization to identify the optimal design solutions.

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