Introduction to Power Factor Improvement (PFI) Plant Main Project:
The electricity is generated and transmitted intensively in the form alternating current; the term power factor comes into play in alternating current transmission, in real time transmission most of the electrical loads are inductive in nature so they create low lagging power factor on the source this undesirable lagging power factor results in increasing current and increasing the loss of active power in the electrical system, high copper loss, poor voltage regulation, right from source to load, so we need to improve the power factor, our project objective is to provide a better situations in energy transmission providing favorable economical conditions and power cost management.
The major cause of poor power factor is due the inductive load behavior so we need to connect an extra device which takes leading power hence the capacitor is connected in parallel to the device to balance the power factor, in this project the power factor improvement plant consists of a Capacitor, Relay, Magnetic contactor, Fuse, Bus-bar, KVA meter, Ampere Selector, Voltage Selector. The assembly and their working phenomenon were clearly explained in the working section.
This power factor improvement plants uses the capacitors as a major source to improve power factor. This is related to the conventional static capacitor phenomenon but it is different because it uses relays and measuring meters to sense the variations in power factor and acts accordingly based on the requirement automatically. This automatic operation is facilitated by the electromagnetic relay which operates when the power factor is low.
The entire assembly and the experimental survey reveal that this system is a highly reliable with low losses, high accuracy with less maintenance, this device can be easily installed and it works under various atmospheric conditions with maximum fault clearance, by implementing this device the lagging KVAR drawn by the inductive devices is greatly reduced.