In the current scenario, power factor has become an important concern in all industries. Poor power factor gives rise to many problems which result in financial loss of industries and also for the commercial users. The main concern of this work is to improve the usage of real power with respect to reactive power hence improving the power factor. Here we have used the technique of relay switching method with a capacitor so that any drop in power factor can be sensed by the controller and switch the capacitor as required. This will not only help to improve power factor but also demand of electricity supply on utility side will be reduced. The Significance of this work is to build an APFC (Automatic Power Factor Correction) Unit. The APFC appliance calculates the reactive power (KVAR) expended by a system’s load and compensates the lagging PF (power factor) utilizing capacitances from capacitor banks.
In This paper presents an approach for optimal placement and sizing of fixed capacitor banks and also optimal conductor selection in radial distribution networks for the purpose of economic minimization of loss and enhancement of voltage. The objective function includes the cost of power losses, voltage profile, fixed capacitor banks and also type of conductor selection. Constraints include voltage limit, maximum permissible carrying current of conductors, size of available capacitors and type of conductors. The optimization problem is solved by the Imperialism Competitive algorithm method and the size and site capacitor banks and type of conductors is determined. To demonstrate the validity of the proposed algorithm, computer simulations are carried out on actual power network of Kerman city, Iran and the simulation results are presented and discussed.
Upkeeping the Battery State-Of-Charge (SoC) and its life are of great significance in Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) & Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEV). This is possible by integrating Solar Photovoltaic Panels (PPs) on the Roof-top of the BEVs & HEVs. However, unlike Solar Powered Vehicle Charging stations and other PV applications where the solar panels are installed in such a way to extract the maximum Photon energy incident on the panel, vehicle Roof-top mount Solar PPs face many challenges in extracting maximum Power due to partial shading issues especially under dynamic conditions when passing under trees, high rise buildings and cloud passages. This paper proposes a new strategy called “Super-capacitor Assisted Photovoltaic Array”. In which Photovoltaic Modules are integrated with Super-capacitors to improve the transient performance of the Photovoltaic Array system. The design of proposed Super-capacitor Assisted PV array is validated & its performance is compared with conventional PV array in Matlab/ Simulink environment.