Development of Solar Array Emulator to improve Testing of Solar Products

Abstract

With the need for a more reliable and cost-effective technique to test the Photo-Voltaic (PV) systems, a Solar Array Emulator has been developed and the work has been presented in this dissertation to meet this concern which incorporates a configurable PV Panel/Array Simulink model that can be used to model different array configurations. It is then used to build a software module through which various PV array configurations could be created to emulate the required Solar Power, varying independently parameters of irradiance and temperature of each PV module model. This also allows us to investigate the characteristics of a PV array under different weather conditions, especially under the condition of non-uniform irradiance, and thus its’ impact on the Device Under Test (DUT) can be analyzed. The PV characteristics have been achieved employing a DC/DC buck converter topology having multiple control loops with the derived model at different weather conditions. For an ideal case the outcomes are accurate to the manufacturer’s datasheet curves and for a practical case the results can be compared to the actual output, hence it can be considered as an alternative to the actual PV output being used for testing and analysis of the systems. Initial programming and simulations were performed in MATLABSimulink,controller card schematics were made through PSPice and dsPIC programming was done in MPLAB during the development of the Solar Array Emulator.