Development of a low cost PV simulator based on FPGA technology

The present paper proposes a low cost photovoltaic simulator with a novel modeling method of PV characteristics in FPGA using MATLAB/XSG toolbox. The main contribution of this work is the utilization of the one-diode model to develop a research platform for rapid prototyping to represent the PV cell. PV emulator systems are used to test different photovoltaic systems under various operating conditions. The model can manage the parameters dependency in the PV panel with respect to solar irradiation and temperature. The input parameters are reduced in order to reduce the calculation time and the values of Rp and R are estimated by an efficient iteration method. The datasheet of the standard PV module gives all the simulator inputs. The proposed emulator system is designed and implemented in the laboratory through XSG in a Virtex 5 FPGA development board. Performance comparison between the software simulation and real-time Hardware in the Loop HIL simulation has been demonstrated. The simulation results prove that the output characteristics of the emulator have good agreement with those of the actual photovoltaic panel.