Universal Control Strategy using Operating Point Projection Technique for Solar Array Hardware Emulation

Solar array simulator (SAS) is a special DC power supply that regulates the output voltage or current to emulate characteristics of photovoltaic (PV) panels. Especially, the control of SAS is a challenging task due to the nonlinearity in the output curve, which is dependent on irradiance as well as temperature and is determined by panel materials. Conventionally, both current-mode control and voltage-mode control should be alternated by partitioning the operating curve into multiple sections, which is not only for the measurement noise problem with the feedback sensing but also for the control stability issue near the maximum power point. However, the occurrence of transition among different controllers may deteriorate the overall performance. To eliminate the mode transitions, a novel single controller scheme has been introduced in this paper, where the operating point projection technique enables simple, smooth and numerically stable control. Theoretical consideration on the loop stability issue is discussed and the performance is verified experimentally for the emulation of a PV panel data in view of stability and response speed.