Abstract
Power Factor (PF) correction is a major power quality function in electrical distribution systems. This paper proposes a low-cost Automatic Power Factor Correction (APFC) system to increase the PF of both lagging and leading single-phase loads. The Arduino Mega 2560 microcontroller was used to calculate the PF and activate the relays that connect the capacitor/inductor banks to the load in parallel. Thus, the required capacitive or inductive reactive power was produced by the APFC system by automatically connecting the capacitor/inductor banks to the load in parallel. The APFC system can also measure and display many electrical parameters of the load such as the rms voltage, the rms current, PF, and the real, reactive, and apparent power on an LCD display. Two zero-crossing detector circuits are used to find the phase angle difference between voltage and current waveforms of the load. The measurement ability of the APFC system was tested for resistive, inductive, and capacitive loads with two different sizes. The measurement results were compared with the measurements of a commercial digital power meter and a measurement error of less than 8.0% was observed. The PF correction ability of the APFC system was verified for inductive and capacitive loads with two different sizes. The experiments show that the PF increased to close to unity for both lagging and leading loads.
Highlights
Power Factor (PF) is a critical performance indicator of the power quality in AC power systems [1, 2]
An Arduino Mega 2560 microcontroller is programmed to decide the number of the capacitors or inductor banks that are automatically connected to a single-phase load by relays to approach load PF close to unity (0.98 lagging)
The voltage and current waveforms obtained from PT and CT1 are sent to the ZCD circuits which contain LM324 operational amplifiers to change the waveform of the voltage and current from sinusoidal to square
Summary
Power Factor (PF) is a critical performance indicator of the power quality in AC power systems [1, 2]. The PF is equal to unity or 1, which means that a given load matches that of a pure resistance having voltage and current waveforms which are in phase [4] This means that the real and apparent power of the load are equal to each other. An Arduino Mega 2560 microcontroller is programmed to decide the number of the capacitors or inductor banks that are automatically connected to a single-phase load by relays to approach load PF close to unity (0.98 lagging). The designed APFC system can measure and display many electrical parameters on an LCD display, such as rms voltage, rms current, PF and its type, and real, reactive, and apparent power of the single-phase load. It is experimentally verified that the designed APFC system can improve the PF by 39% for small inductive load, 52% for high inductive load, 12% for low capacitive load, and 29% for high capacitive load
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