Investigation of standalone photovoltaic systems

The experimentation was proposed to investigate standalone photovoltaic (SPV) system for size matching between solar array and batteries by using the hardware simulator of the SPV systems or the SPV systems simulator (SPVSS). This SPVSS was developed through integrating a solar array simulator (SAS), two batteries, an electronic load (EL), a data acquisition unit (DAU) as well as a switching and conditioning circuit. The entire simulator is controlled and monitored by a computer with the help of graphic programming language, LabVIEW. Based on this SPVSS, different settings of the SAS representing different sizes of solar array or the same solar array with different weather conditions were set to charge the batteries whereas the EL representing the load demand was set to discharge the batteries. The experimentation shows that the proper size of solar array can be obtained to match the sizes of batteries for the given load demand by using this developed SPVSS.