Solar PV emulator for realizing PV characteristics under rapidly varying environmental conditions

Due to increasing importance of distributed generation and smart grid, solar PV systems are gaining more and more importance. However for the efficient design of the solar PV systems, solar emulator is necessary which mimics the actual PV characteristics. In this paper, a solar PV emulator with quasi sliding mode controller is presented which can simulate the real time PV characteristics under varying insolation and temperature. The advantage of the proposed emulator is that it can produce accurate I-V characteristics under fast varying environmental conditions. A low cost microcontroller based controller is developed for building the laboratory prototype of emulator. Moreover the software interfacing with user friendly GUI is developed. The proposed controller and emulator hardware can be useful for various applications like MPPT system design for automobile applications, battery chargers, inverters and grid connected systems.