Fuzzy logic controller for reactive power compensation

Reactive power compensation is a technique to compensate the unwanted effects of reactive loads that make the power factor less than unity. It is necessary to account for the main challenges in the industrial power systems like improvement of transmission efficiency, harmonic loss reduction and power quality improvement. This has increased the emphasis on the need for accurate and economic methods of power measurement and reactive power compensation in recent years. In view of this, the present manuscript focuses on the design and implementation of a simple and cost effective fuzzy logic controller for reactive power compensation with load monitoring using Peripheral Interface Controller (PIC16F877A). This involves an accurate sensing of power parameters and by using proper algorithm, sufficient capacitors are switched on to maintain the power factor near to unity (or the reactive power near to zero). A fuzzy logic based digital controller is developed to establish an efficient control over the system. The fuzzy logic control algorithm comprises of a set of linguistic rules written in accordance to the experience and intuitive reasoning. The introduction of fuzzy logic controller gives an excellent performance in the transient state, a good rejection of load disturbances, and a good robustness. The proposed system also monitors the load continuously and displays the parameters such as voltage, current, power factor, active, reactive and apparent powers in the LCD module. The proposed system has been implemented and tested in the laboratory for single phase loads.