Effective in-laboratory test method for PV power generation with enhanced PV emulation accuracy

Abstract

Photovoltaic (PV) systems require outdoor experiments to verify their functionality and reliability. However, outdoor experiments require complicated experimental set-ups including PV panels, power conversion circuits and controllers. In addition, the experimental data obtained from such systems can be easily affected by environmental conditions such as weather, temperature and season. Recently, PV emulation methods have been proposed that can emulate PV characteristics in the laboratory by connecting a DC supply to PV modules in parallel. However, the voltage characteristics of the conventional PV emulator are different from those of real PV panels, which degrades the accuracy of the PV emulator. This paper proposes an effective PV emulation method with accuracy improvements at the maximum power point of the PV panel, which is based on a simple circuit analysis. Using the proposed PV emulation method, the performance verification of a target PV system can be easily and accurately obtained. The proposed emulation method for PV power generation is experimentally verified by comparisons between it, the conventional emulation method and results obtained from outdoor experiments.