Web Application for Power Factor Correction of a Photovoltaic System with Capacitor Bank

Abstract

Brazilian legislation establishes the minimum power factor limit for certain periods of the week, under the penalty of charging for excess reactive power. However, for such consumers, variations that unbalance the power factor are frequent. This is the case with the educational institution Ifes - Campus Serra, which, despite using auxiliary equipment, is penalized monthly. Therefore, the objective of this work was to create a web application, usable by different users, that allows them to simulate different scenarios of input combinations (line voltage, current transformer, compensation strategy, and capacitors) to visualize the best solution to adjust the power factor of the consumer unit, based on the data they provide to the application. As results, the application identified the minimum and maximum capacitive reactive power needed to correct the desired power factor (0.92), with values ranging from 0.46 kVAr to 16.38 kVAr; and, among the 34,013 records analyzed over a year, identified 7,453 of them as sources of excess reactive power, pointed out the most demanded values for power factor correction (between 4.46 kVAr and 13.66 kVAr), and proposed replacing the two 30 kVAr capacitors installed there with one 5 kVAr and one 7.5 kVAr. The NPV indicator of R$ 6,595.10 proved to be viable, with a financial return above the minimum attractiveness rate.