Automatic Power Factor Correction for Residential Consumers

Abstract

This paper presents an automatic power factor correction unit which reduces system power loss and improves system performance by increasing the efficiency. Power wastage, now a days, is a global issue and hence proposed unit provides cost and energy effective solution. The increased use of inductive loads results in poor power factor in various residential locations. Therefore, a need to enhance the power factor of system increases in a present scenario and power factor can easily be improved by employing suitable techniques of power factor correction. The proposed technique improves the power factor and restores its value close to unity for efficient operation. The increased power factor reduces the system losses which in turn improves the voltage at load end. The corrected power factor also enhances the load carrying capability of an entire network. The proposed technique to improve the power factor, monitors the energy consumption continuously and automatically improves the power factor. The proposed technique discussed in this paper is possible with the help of 8051 microcontroller. The 8051 microcontroller senses time-variant values i.e. line voltage and line current from the system and these time variant values are further utilized to obtain phase angle and corresponding power factor. These two time variant values are calibrated properly to obtain the desired power factor. It also determines the range of power factor and depending on the power factor, it incorporates the capacitor in shunt across the load which in turn improves the power factor. The power factor correction device is designed and tested under load conditions and it is found that the power factor value is increased from 0.71 to 0.96. The average savings in energy consumption is also found to be 1.5% for load used for this proposed technique. There is significant saving in energy cost due to compensation of reactive power.