Automatic power factor correction unit

Power factor losses represent a significant factor of power losses in both industrial and domestic units. Various methods have been devised earlier to tackle this problem. This paper aims to present an indigenous technique and method which could be used for static power factor correction. It is demonstrated in this work that phase difference between voltage and current can be determined using zero crossing detectors, opto-couplers, EXOR gate and some basic function of Arduino microcontroller. The RMS value of AC signal has been obtained by sampling precisely rectifying AC signal sing super diodes. Voltage and current transformers have been used for transforming load voltage and current respectively to bring them in desired working range of microcontroller.

[1]  Nader Barsoum.  Programming of PIC Micro-Controller for Power Factor Correction , 2007, First Asia International Conference on Modelling & Simulation (AMS'07).

[2]  Ahsan Shahid,et al.  Microchip based embedded system design for achievement of high power factor in electrical power systems , 2013, 2013 IEEE PES Asia-Pacific Power and Energy Engineering Conference (APPEEC).

[3]  L. Venkatesha,et al.  Active power factor correction technique for single phase full bridge rectifier , 2014, 2014 International Conference on Advances in Energy Conversion Technologies (ICAECT).

[4]  Sabir Rüstemli,et al.  Measurement and Simulation of Power Factor using PIC16F877 , 2012 .

[5]  Dhananjay V. Gadre,et al.  ARM(R) Microcontroller Based Automatic Power Factor Monitoring and Control System , 2013, 2013 Texas Instruments India Educators' Conference.