An Extremely Low-Cost Multi-Panel PV Emulator for Research and Education

Photovoltaic (PV) emulators are necessary tools for teaching research and development when actual PV panels cannot be used. Emulation can be used when design parameters such as size and quantity of PV resources required exceed the capacity of laboratories. Emulation schemes available today use expensive hardware and/or require software licenses. This paper presents a new PV emulator using the extremely low-cost real-time digital controller platform “Workbench”. The proposed scheme uses low-cost hardware built around a single DSP and a DC bench power supply to emulate PV panels which can be used to test other equipment such as grid-tied inverters, and/or MPPT controllers. The proposed scheme is modular, in that multiple such emulators can be externally series/parallel connected. Each emulator can also be configured to emulate a combination of series/parallel connected PVs.