The overuse of fossil fuels in real life applications has caused their rapid depletion and fast climate change due to global warming and thus access to eco-friendly energy resources has become essential to meet the growing demand of clean energy. With this view, solar energy has proven to be an effective alternative and clean source of energy for the sustainable development of the society worldwide. Solar energy is a cheap, abundant and everlasting source of renewable energy and thus it can be integrated with different systems deals with energy consumption to overcome the dependency of present society on conventional fuels. Such integration of solar energy has given an opportunity for several studies based on the energy and exergy approaches. The energy analysis is very crucial in the study of process effectiveness while the exergetic analysis is another important tool to investigate the realistic behaviour of process involving various energy losses and internal irreversibility. The main objective of this article is to bring out valuable recommendations for wide exploitation of solar energy systems for different applications, from a thermodynamics perspective. Therefore, the present article has summarized the previous findings on energy and exergy analyses of different solar energy systems (solar drying, solar air conditioning and refrigeration, solar water heating, solar cooking and solar power generation through solar photovoltaic and concentrated solar power techniques used for various heat and power generation applications).

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