Principal Investigator: Dr. Roy McCann
High power, e.g., 1 MW, photovoltaic (PV) source simulators can be utilized to evaluate the performance and study the grid integration issues of the utility scale PV inverters in the laboratories. However, due to the high cost of commercial PV simulators at MW level, which are usually programmable DC power supplies, this testing capability is not common in public testing facilities. In this project, a hybrid PV simulator is proposed to emulate PV arrays up to MW scale.
The reference curves can be either generated by using an actual PV cell to ensure the high fidelity, or obtained by using model based methods, such that repeatable results can be produced. The power stage will consist of a grid-connected active front end and an interleaved dc-dc converter. A novel sliding mode controller will be developed to ensure the reference tracking performance and the bandwidth of the PV simulator. Both hardware-in-the-loop simulation and experimental studies will be performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed PV simulator.
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