A Cheap and Efficient Photovoltaic Emulator

24th European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference, 21-25 September 2009, Hamburg, Germany; 3741-3744
A photovoltaic (PV) emulator is a controllable power source which allows to reproduce the real operating conditions of a PV field. The usefulness of a such device consists in the possibility to evaluate the performances of the electronic circuits adopted in a PV system rapidly and at any moment without the use of a real PV source. The most advanced PV emulators allow to reproduce the PV curves both in stationary and dynamic environmental conditions; in this paper this type of PV emulator has been presented. It is composed by an adjustable current generator in parallel with a non-linear circuit. The work has been centered only on the study of the non linear circuit because the current source can be easily obtained by using a common controllable power supply. The developed emulator is easy to use because it does not need a complex setting, it is modular and, if an existing power supplies is used, it can be obtained cheaply. The Spice simulations and the experimental results confirm the goodness of the proposed solution.