Design and Realization of a Low-Cost and High Accurate Photovoltaic Emulator System Using Buck-Boost Converter

Abstract

This paper presents a high-accuracy photovoltaic emulator system using DC-DC Buck-Boost converter. The realization of the emulator is carried out using an ATmega1280 microcontroller, allowing the emulation of photovoltaic modules in a low cost system with weather conditions defined by the user. A mathematical model based on straight lines model is built using MATLAB / Simulink in order to reproduce the solar current-voltage  characteristics and an appropriate control scheme to improve the performance of the emulator’ output. As a result, the output characteristics of the emulator are in good agreement with the ones of the actual solar panel in different weather and load conditions.