Development of a Converter-based Supercapacitor System Emulator for PV Applications

As the utilization of supercapacitors in power system applications continues to increase, it is important to observe their behavior under transient and long-term operations in order to understand their impact on power grids. A real-time reconfigurable hardware testbed (HTB) is a power network emulator that provides flexibility to study various power system scenarios. This paper presents an emulation of a supercapacitor for a photovoltaic (PV) system on the HTB platform such that its dynamic behavior during power system scenarios can be observed. The developed emulator on the HTB is verified by comparing the emulation results with the model developed in MATLAB/Simulink. The experimental results of the emulator are consistent with the simulation results under the grid support scenarios. This supercapacitor emulator can be potentially used for various power system scenarios in addition to the PV applications presented in this paper.