Photovoltaic Emulator of Different Solar Array Configurations under Partial Shading Conditions using Damping Injection Controller

In the last decades, researchers and scientists have been trending towards renewable energy researches as a noteworthy alternative able to substitute efficiently the conventional energy resources which suffer from depletion and impact negatively the environment. Photovoltaic (PV) solar energy is one of the reliable important sources of energy which has received great attention nowadays. As a matter of fact, the need of laboratory system devoted to performing measurements and experimentation on PV systems such as Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) techniques is being increased. The PV array emulator is designed to accomplish this task by reproducing accurately the electrical behavior of real PV modules and arrays which are very expensive and sensitive to weather conditions. The present paper proposes a new control and design of PV source emulator using Passivity and Damping Injection control, this nonlinear power device is able to emulate with high-bandwidth and accuracy PV modules and different PV array configurations under uniform solar irradiance and partial shading conditions.