Increasing ride-through capability of control panels using square-wave series voltage compensator

Voltage sags represent one of the most frequent problems of Power Quality. A common way to mitigate this issue is to protect the affected process using a large series voltage compensator (SVC), such as Dynamic Voltage Restorer. However, few procedures could be taken before purchasing an expensive series voltage compensator. Some adjustable speed drives (ASD) have embedded functions to protect itself from voltage sags. Besides that, contactors and PLCs could be protected by square-wave series voltage compensators which have been showed to be cost-effective. This paper shows that using the “ride-through” function of ASDs, and also cost-effective square-wave SVCs lead toward an improvement of the protected process ride-through. A didactic control panel was used to evaluate these procedures with experimental results.