A novel low cost portable integrated solar PV, fuel cell and battery emulator with fast tracking algorithm

Applications based on renewable energy sources are getting worldwide attention. Laboratory level research involving renewable energy sources, poses many difficulties like high cost, dependency on environmental conditions and its repeatability, space requirements etc. These difficulties can be sorted out by using a hardware emulator that can accurately mimic the characteristics of a particular renewable energy sources. An emulator is supposed to replicate the voltage and current (V-I) steady state and dynamic characteristics of any source such as solar Photovoltaics (PV), Fuel Cell (FC) etc. Typically it is a low cost and a portable alternative for the use of actual renewable sources. Unfortunately, many of them suffer from poor dynamic response as compared to their actual counterparts. This paper proposes a new integrated emulator that provides emulation with fast load tracking capability for three energy sources viz. solar PV, Proton Exchange Membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) and battery. This can offer a low cost solution for test-bed setup facilitating the continuous research efforts irrespective of the actual environmental conditions in the field of renewable energy and NCE. The proposed emulator is designed and built around a Texas Instrument´s TMS320F28027 controlled flyback converter and National Instrument´s NIDAQ USB6008 interfaced with LabVIEW based GUI. Key results of the proposed system along with control implementation and modeling are presented.