Ramanarayana Vemana, Dr. M. Sridhar
Shunt-capacitor placement plays an important role in operation and distribution system planning. Optimal Shunt-capacitor placement can result in system loss reduction, voltage profile improvement, power factor correction and feeder capacity release. To reach these benefits to extent under various distribution engineers, operating constraints are required to determine the optimal locations and sizes of capacitors to be placed and control settings of switched capacitors at different load levels. A Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based approach is used to achieve optimal shunt-capacitor placement in radial distribution systems. Different load levels and Discrete nature of capacitors are all taken into consideration in the problem formulation. Mathematically, the shunt-capacitor placement problem is a non-differentiable and non-linear mixed integer optimization problem with a set of inequality and equality operating constraints. The proposed solution method employs to search for optimal locations and sizes of capacitors to be placed and optimal numbers of switched capacitor banks at different load levels. The proposed method is tested on 15, 33, 69 for balanced loads and 19, 52 for unbalanced loads in radial distribution systems by using MATLAB software.