Development of a photovoltaic array emulator in a real time control environment using xPC target

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the design and construction of a photovoltaic array emulator for high power applications in order to test all kind of photovoltaic inverters. To develop such device, a rapid prototyping tool based on xPC Target of Matlab/Simulink has been used, providing a real-time testing environment. PV array emulator can be used to evaluate the performance of photovoltaic inverters as any test conditions can be programmed. The proposed emulator operates as a distributed control system taking advantage of the TCP/IP protocol features.