Mission Profile Emulation for PV Characteristic of Converters with MPPT Algorithm

With widespread integration of photovoltaic (PV) converters in modern grids, reliability of PV converters is becoming essential, and therefore, there is an urgent need for comprehensive reliability test before PV converters are put into practice. Reliability of PV converter is affected by multiple factors, such as PV array sizing, environment (i.e., solar irradiance and ambient temperature) and various control algorithms. However, conventional reliability testing methods can hardly create test conditions closed to actual mission profiles. Recently, several emulators have been proposed for replicating PV power generation and MPPT algorithms, but they are either hard to implement or costly in reliability tests. In this paper, a mission profile emulation system is proposed as a PV emulator for gridconnected converters, offering flexible mission profiles, avoiding implementing extra hardware and reducing testing costs. A prototype has been built, and simulation and experiment have been carried out to validate the proposed method.