Fault location in shunt capacitor banks

Shunt capacitor banks (SCBs) are used in the electrical industry for power factor correction and voltage support. Over the years, the purpose of SCBs has not changed, but as new dielectric materials came to market, the fusing practices for these banks changed from externally fused to internally fused, fuseless, and finally to unfused. While the identification of faulty capacitor units is easy with an externally fused bank, it is more complex with the other types of fusing, making maintenance and fault investigation difficult and expensive. This paper presents a novel method to identify the faulted phase in all capacitor banks and the faulted phase and section in most capacitor banks. This method can reduce the time to identify faulty units by more than 80 percent in large capacitor banks.