Investigating the Performance of Solar Thermal Assisted Air Conditioning System Under the Summer Season of Baghdad, Iraq

Solar thermal-driven air conditioning systems integrated with thermal energy storage are promising to reduce electrical energy consumption in the severe summer months of Baghdad, Iraq. However, such systems still face the obstacle of supplying heat to the hybrid system during their operation at night due to their limited sensible thermal storage capacity. That makes such a system not commercial, even though it has high performance and consumes less electrical energy than the traditional system. The current research studies the influential design parameters and their effects on the overall system performance of solar thermal-driven air conditioning systems integrated with thermal energy storage systems. This study investigates experimentally the effect of reducing energy consumption in air conditioning systems on system performance by integrating solar thermal energy into the system and its effect on the performance at night. The results showed that the electrical energy consumption of the hybrid air conditioning system was reduced by 64%, and the COP was 9.09 instead of 4.93 with the traditional.