Published Paper Details:

In recent years, the power quality of the ac system has become a great concern due to the rapidly increased numbers of electronic equipment, power electronics, and high voltage power system. Most of the commercial and industrial installation in the country has large electrical loads which are more inductive in nature causing lagging power factor which gives heavy penalties to consumers by the electricity board. This situation is taken care of by PFC. Power factor correction is the capacity of absorbing the reactive power produced by a load. In the case of fixed loads, this can be done manually by switching capacitors. However in the case of rapidly varying and scattered loads it becomes difficult to maintain a high power factor by manually switching on/off the capacitors. This drawback is overcome by using an APFC panel. In this project, measuring of power factor from the load is done by using ATMEGA328 microcontroller and trigger required capacitors and extra synchronous condenser in order to compensate reactive power and bring power factor near to unity (1).