FC and PV emulation by buck converter based on experimental VxI curves and dynamic response

Abstract

This paper presents an emulation of fuel cell and photovoltaic modules based on the buck converter as a replacement of actual power sources for bench tests. This approach is suitable for power electronic designs involving power converters to interface source and DC loads or source and mains grid, without having available the real source. The output voltage of the buck converter is referred to lookup tables/equations with experimental data from actual sources under load variation to determinate the biasing curves and dynamic response. To validate the results, a comparison between simulated and practical results obtained from laboratory test with actual sources is performed. The energy source emulations with buck converters is a simple, safe, versatile, and effective way of physically representing DC sources for various laboratory tests.