Improvement of an emulator-based platform for design of photovoltaic converters and controllers

Platforms based on emulators have become extremely useful in designing the development of static converters and controllers. The Solar Explorer Kit is one of the most used commercial platforms with a photovoltaic panel emulator. This paper presents relevant improvements made in the setup of the mentioned platform. First, the curves for the photovoltaic emulator were modified, since the curves originally used by the platform do not represent the voltage x current relationship of a real photovoltaic panel. Also, a maximum power point tracking (MPPT) technique based on Fuzzy logic was included in the platform for a comparison to the original ones: “perturb and observe” and “incremental conductance”. The three techniques are compared using computer simulations and experimental implementation in the platform mentioned above. The simulation of the system was made using the software PSIM
^®
, and practical implementation was made using the Solar Explorer Kit. Results demonstrate the improvement of the proposed modifications.