The photovoltaic emulator developed in consists in amplifying a photodiode I-V characteristic, which is considered as a PV cell. The reference generation could be analogue or digital in, two analogue reference generations were presented. In the literature, several methods to emulate photovoltaic panel behaviour have been studied. Recall that, those electronic power devices are able to reproduce the electrical behaviour of photovoltaic panels under controllable conditions. Photovoltaic emulators are nowadays becoming an alternative solution for indoor studying and analysing of photovoltaic systems. The results showed that the emulator was able to behave accurately as the studied photovoltaic panel. The practical tests were performed on a prototype designed using a MATLAB C MEX S-function, dSPACE board 1104, and a controlled DC/DC converter.
#E and m power emulator Offline#
The emulator is able to operate online with connected solar radiation and temperature sensors or offline with recorded measurement vectors. The validation of the proposed emulator is carried out by comparing in real-time, both the studied panel output and the emulator output, under variable load, temperature, and irradiation levels. Furthermore, the proposed approach takes into account the incidence solar angle, as an input parameter, to offer the possibility of evaluating daily losses for different values of tilt angle.
The latter requires more memory for increasing accuracy and considering all the desired environmental situations. This paper presents the design and implementation of a photovoltaic emulator, based on an accurate mathematical model of a photovoltaic panel, instead of the look-up table method.