Design and simulation of photovoltaic emulator

To evaluate the performances of electronic power converters for photovoltaic (PV) applications, a PV energy source or a PV emulator is required. The PV emulator has the advantage of being low cost, portable and reconfigurable. With a PV emulator, it is possible to reproduce the current vs. voltage characteristics of PV sources that depends on solar irradiance and temperature. Moreover, it is possible to fairly compare advantages and drawbacks of different MPPT algorithms. In this paper a dynamic photovoltaic emulator based on a buck converter with an average current mode control loop is proposed. The emulator algorithm to track the desired operating conditions is simulated using Matlab/Simulink for a constant step size. The simulation results verified that the algorithm has improved dynamic and steady-state performance.