Abstract:

From the past decade and continuing up to the present, there is a very great interest among researchers in using solar energy to reduce electric power consumption because of the ever-increasing price of fossil fuels. The trend towards improving the efficiency of the photovoltaic plate has attracted the interest of many researchers by integrating this system with a solar collector to form a hybrid thermal system. The present study aims to improve the traditional hybrid PV collector by integrating it with a PCM storage unit and comparing its result with a similar hybrid PV collector without a storage unit. Both hybrid collectors have been subjected to practical experiments under actual, simultaneous weather conditions for four months, starting from January until April 2021 in Kirkuk, Iraq. The simulation results showed that integrating the thermal collector with the PV panel improved its overall performance. When adding a PCM volume to the conventional hybrid PVT, the system performance increased twice as much as it obtained without this unit. The result obtained from the present study agrees well with other similar works.<

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