Discrimination of capacitor transients for position identification

Abstract

Capacitor banks are used extensively in power systems for power factor improvement or for compensation of reactive power demand of large commercial and industrial load. There are many occasions when capacitor bank switching on or off line is required, causing transients. These transients introduced by capacitor switching are becoming an increasing concern as modern equipment is more sensitive to power quality phenomena. This paper pursues the discrimination of positions of switching capacitors in order to take on-line and post-fault measures. This discrimination is done on radial distribution systems where two capacitor banks are present. The presented approach permits two different situations to be distinguished where one of the capacitor banks upstream or downstream of the load is switched and the other one is off. We discuss analytical and simulation results.