SIMINTECH-Based Computer Modeling for Solar Power Plant

Converting solar power to electricity is the most promising and actively developing area of the renewable power sector. Solar power is widely available and has virtually unlimited resources. In addition, the photoelectric conversion does not pollute the environment. The direct conversion of solar energy to electricity uses the photoelectric effect in solar elements based on the p-n transition structure. Today, solar power plants comprise a solar panel, an inverter, a battery, a controller, etc. When designing new technical solutions taking into account the operation of every solar power plant, it is feasible to use application software. This article presents the development stages of the imitation model of the solar power plant prepared in the SimInTech software. The advantage of using this program is a library of blocks described with specific equivalent circuits. The quality of the solar power plant output voltage can be assessed using the spectral density function. The model supports adjusting the PWM signal to control the IGBT transistors of the bridge inverter, namely the duty cycle and the number of pulses forming the voltage half-wave. Imitating the operation of a solar power plant stands for the operation of switches controlled by the model's programming block to supply electric power from the solar panel, battery, or power grid to the load. The modeling produced a dependency of output voltage between the load and the load current. The authors provide recommendations to adjust the blocks of the obtained model and interpretations of the obtained results.