This paper presents the design and implementation of a photovoltaic emulator, based on an accurate mathematical model of a photovoltaic panel, instead of the look-up table method. The latter requires more memory for increasing accuracy and considering all the desired environmental situations. Furthermore, the proposed approach takes into account the incidence solar angle, as an input parameter, to offer the possibility of evaluating daily losses for different values of tilt angle. The validation of the proposed emulator is carried out by comparing in real-time, both the studied panel output and the emulator output, under variable load, temperature, and irradiation levels. The emulator is able to operate online with connected solar radiation and temperature sensors or offline with recorded measurement vectors. The practical tests were performed on a prototype designed using a MATLAB C MEX S-function, dSPACE board 1104, and a controlled DC/DC converter. The results showed that the emulator was able to behave accurately as the studied photovoltaic panel.

Photovoltaic Emulators (PVEs) has become more a fundamental tool in the study of PV systems. Besides their many operating principles, the design and the implementation of a PVE are still in progress. In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient PVE based on the dsPIC30F4011, which is equipped with a DSP engine dedicated to high-performance control applications. The control algorithm consists of an adaptive PI controller and a Perturb and Observe (P&O) algorithm for reference generation. This innovative and straightforward combination gives an efficient algorithm easy to be loaded and programmed on low-cost digital platforms, such as microcontrollers. The implementation under the dsPIC device makes the prototype inexpensive compared with the existing commercial PVEs, but not at the expense of simplicity and accuracy. The prototype is well optimized and described to be reproducible in laboratories. The effectiveness of the proposed method was validated using a platform that consists of a dsPIC30F4011, a current-controlled buck converter, a current sensor, and voltage one. The results show that the designed emulator prototype accurately behaves as the studied PV panel under different load and weather conditions.