OPTIMAL CAPACITOR PLACEMENT ON RADIAL DISTRIBUTION FEEDERS IN PRESENCE OF NONLINEAR LOADS USING BINARY PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION

Harmonic distortion is increasing in distribution power systems due to the proliferation of nonlinear distorting loads. Capacitor significantly influences the propagation of system harmonics, and could cause parallel resonance. Therefore, the optimal selection and placement of capacitor banks must be integrated with the estimation of harmonic levels to avoid excessive harmonic distortion. The problem of capacitor placement involves maximizing of the net saving with inequality constraints. This paper proposes a binary particle swarm optimization (PSO) to solve the capacitor placement problems. The proposed method has been applied to: (1) IEEE 9-bus test system and the results are compared with that obtained using exhaustive search. (2) IEEE 34-bus test system. The simulation results show the ability of the binary PSO to solve the capacitor placement problems and investigate the effect of nonlinear loads on optimal capacitor placement.