This Chapter presents an analysis of the fundamentals of feedback control for DC/ DC converters and an example of emulator design realized by a buck converter. The choice of the buck scheme is justified on the basis of the possibility to implement an appropriate control strategy for the emulation purpose. Both the PV model and […]

Figure 8.37 shows a picture of the experimental rack containing the PV emulator. At the top of the rack the DC power supply can be observed. The operation of the PV emulator has been tested by laboratory measurements. The used measurement system is composed by: • a digital oscilloscope with a bandwidth of 1 GHz […]

The optimal exploitation of a PV source is obtained by maximizing the delivered power. This means that the optimal resistance load must be set to VMP//MP. Since the MPP is variable with environmental parameters, the load value should be continuously changed to follow this optimal operating condition. A possible way to realize a variable load […]

The PV emulator control is experimentally implemented using the DSP-2 board developed at the Institute of Robotica of Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in Maribor, Slovenia. The DSP-2 board is a high performance, floating-point digital signal processor – based inverter controller. This board, in combination with DSP-2 library, can be successfully used for […]

The DC/DC buck converter is supplied by the TDK-Lambda GEN600-5.5 DC power supply because, with this solution, the maximum deliverable current can be elec­tronically limited and the PV emulator is galvanically isolated from the power grid. As an alternative, an isolation transformer and a bridge rectifier can be used to obtain the supply voltage for […]

The principle block diagram of the PV emulator is represented in Fig. 8.31. It encompasses the DC/DC buck converter and a control board, whose inputs are the converter output voltage and current and whose output is the control signal of the buck converter. The control board implements both the PV model and the control algorithm. […]

In order to evaluate the performance of the PV emulator, developed according to the previously described design constraints, a simulation analysis is carried out. It exploits the association of Matlab/Simulink® environment and PLECS® (Piece­wise Linear Electrical Circuit Simulation for Simulink) toolbox. As specified in Chap. 5, PLECS® allows an actual plant, for example a power […]

As previously highlighted, a good dynamic behavior is required in order to take into account the loading effect of the power converter supplied by the PV emulator. The possibility to impose the closed-loop poles, by using the pole placement technique, described in Sect. 8.4, permits to obtain a fast dynamical response. The output impedance of […]