An emulator design which can modeling the effects of partial shadowing

The output characteristics of photovoltaic (PV) panels are affected by many parameters such as radiation, temperature, shading, and surface cleanliness. It cannot possible to repeat the tests with PV panels to examine these effects under the same conditions due to stochastic changes in radiation intensity and temperature. However, thanks to emulators that act like PV panels, experiments can be repeated under the same conditions. In this thesis, we designed a PV panel emulator which can model the partial shading effects of PV panels. The designed PV emulator consists of three series connected cell strings and has a total output power of 250 W. The cell strings of emulator were implemented with DC/DC buck converters. A 32-bit microcontroller development board was used to control the DC/DC converters and the firmware of microcontroller was graphically prepared in MATLAB/Simulink environment. In addition, an interface is designed in LabVIEW environment for operating the emulator with the desired scenario and acquiring the operating point data. The designed emulator was tested with five different radiation and temperature scenarios prepared for this study. The obtained experimental results were compared with the simulation results achieved in MATLAB/Simulink program. Statistical analysis showed that experimental and simulation results overlap.