Mitigation of Power Losses and Enhancement in Voltage Profile by Optimal Placement of Capacitor Banks With Particle Swarm Optimization in Radial Distribution Networks

Abstract

The prime purpose of placing a capacitor bank in a power system is to provide reactive power, reduce power losses, and enhances voltage profile. The main challenge is to determine the optimum capacitor position and size that reduces both system power losses and the overall cost of the system with rigid constraints. For this purpose, different optimization techniques are used, for example Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) which converges the complex non-linear problem in a systematic and methodological way to find the best optimal solution. In this paper, the standard IEEE 33-bus and 69-bus systems are used to find the optimum location and size of the capacitors bank. These power networks are simulated in Siemens PSS®E software. For the optimum solution of capacitor banks, the PSO algorithm is used. The PSO fitness function is modelled in such a way which contains the high average bus voltage, the small size of capacitor banks, and low power losses. The fitness function used is a weighted type to reduce the computation time and multi-objective function complexity.