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Hi, my name is Gary Raposa, and I’m an application engineer here at Agilent Technologies.
Today, I want to talk to you about testing DC to DC optimizers or a DC to DC converter using
a solar array simulator made by Agilent Technologies. I have here an example of a DC to DC converter,
as I said, also known as a DC optimizer. This one happens to be made by Texas Instruments,
and it’s a prototype of one of their designs. And what I’ll be doing is I’ll be providing
the input voltage for this DC optimizer and from the solar array simulator, and I have
the output hooked up to just one of our Agilent electronic loads in order to pull
power from the optimizer. So let’s take a look at how that all works.
I’m going to turn the instruments on, and you’ll hear the fan noise come up here in
just a moment. Okay – so I’ve turned the instruments on, and now I have the power running
into the DC to DC converter coming from the solar array simulator, and I’ve also got
the electronic load pulling power out of the DC to DC converter. And I have some demonstration
software that I want to show you which will demonstrate some of the capabilities of the
solar array simulator. So let’s take a quick look at that.
On the software there’s a graph that shows current on the vertical axis on the left side
here in blue, and on the right side in green is the power. So the IV curve is shown in
blue: I being current, V on the horizontal axis being voltage. And the – this is the
present IV curve. Also the red crosshairs that you see on there – those red crosshairs
are the actual operating point – the present operating point of the solar array simulator.
So you can see it’s operating right at the maximum power point on this green curve.
The green curve shows the power comes up and it goes back down again. That’s the power
available from that IV curve, IV curve being simulated by the solar array simulator simulating
what would come out of a real solar panel. So it’s the job of that DC to DC optimizer
to keep that operating point right at the peak of the green curve. So let’s see what
happens here. What I can do in this demonstration software is I can move the cloud back and
forth in front of the sun to block some light, and that will move the IV curve. It’s really
changing the IV curve on the SAS, and as a result we see that the red crosshairs are
continuing to stay at the peak of that power curve – right at that maximum power point
right there no matter what the sunlight is. So as I increase the sunlight here again,
the IV curves will go up, and the micro-converter is able to track that maximum power point.
That’s what its job is. So again, we’ve got the SAS providing the DC input power to
the converter. The output of the converter is going to an Agilent electronic load just
pulling a constant amount of current from the converter. And as the sunlight blocks
the sun, we have less light available, less power available, but this still harvests as
much power as possible from the IV curve. So we just saw how the Agilent Technologies’
solar array simulator is able to provide DC input power to something like a DC to DC optimizer
in order to test it and make sure that it’s able to provide power at that maximum power
point and all the other attributes of a DC optimizer or DC to DC converter.
Once again, the Agilent E4360A solar array simulator really is an ideal instrument in
order to provide that input power to test a product like a DC to DC converter or a DC optimizer.