A Novel Hybrid Control Strategy with Gain Scheduling for Photovoltaic Emulators

Photovoltaic (PV) emulators are widely used at present in real-time research and experimentation on solar PV systems. There are different control strategies for PV emulators found in the literature and this paper presents a microcontroller-based solar PV emulator which consists of a DC-DC buck converter and lookup table-based implementation capable of mimicking the non-linear characteristics of different types of solar PV modules at different temperatures, irradiation levels and loads. It uses a novel hybrid control strategy with gain scheduling. Here, a voltage reference or a current reference is used as the control input depending on the operating point and gain scheduling is used to account for any instability introduced by the varying operating point. The entire system has been simulated in MATLAB Simulink and implemented in hardware. Further, it was tested using the Kyocera KC200GT solar PV module and the experimental results show that it precisely replicates the 1-V characteristics of a given solar PV module.