Power quality improvement of distribution system by reactive power compensation

Reactive power management plays a vital role in improving power quality of the system. The major concern in reactive power management is location and quantity of placing capacitor at optimal location in the radial/mesh/interconnected distributions network is multi-objectives function with certain constraints. Optimally placing and sizing of capacitors reduces active power loss of the system, improves a voltage profile and power factor of the system. In this paper Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is used to achieve required objectives, which is a nonlinear optimization problem. The whole work is divided into two steps, identification of weaker nodes by using Voltage Sensitivity Factor (VSF) and combination of two sensitivity factors Voltage Stability Index and Voltage Sensitivity Factor (VSI, and VSF). Secondly, sizing of capacitors is done by using PSO technique, calculates the amount of reactive power compensation requires in each bus. The proposed algorithm is tested on IEEE 24-Bus system in MATLAB.