Automatic Power Factor Corrector Using Capacitor Bank

The rapidly growing number of electronic devices, power electronics, and high voltage power systems have made the power quality of the ac system a major concern in recent years. Large electrical loads that are multiple-inductive in nature, present in the majority of commercial and industrial installations across the nation, result in lagging power factors, which are penalized heavily by the electricity board for the consumers. PFC is handling this matter. The ability of a load to absorb reactive power is known as power factor correction. It is possible to manually switch the capacitors on and off in response to the variation in the load within an installation when dealing with constant loads. However, when dealing with rapidly variable and scattered loads, this becomes more challenging to maintain a high power factor. The APFC panel is used to get around this problem. The Atmega328 microcontroller is used in this article to measure power factor from load and to trigger the necessary capacitors to adjust reactive power and approach unity in power factor.