Optimal capacitor placement and sizing in an unbalanced three-phase distribution system using particle swarm optimization technique

Installing shunt capacitors in a radial distribution system can provide a lot of benefit to utility and users. There are many ways to install capacitors as long as the sizes do not exceed the original inductive reactive power of a system. But it is very difficult to determine the best locations and size of capacitors. In addition, the unbalance nature of distribution system make the placement becomes more complicated. Optimal placement of capacitor is a highly nonlinear optimization problem which requires discrete control variables. This paper proposed an artificial intelligence approach to obtain optimal total line loss reduction and total cost of capacitor while improving the voltage profile along the feeders. It was done by integrating the circuitry distribution model in SIMULINK with particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique constructed in MATLAB. The optimization process was done in two stage where the first stage is to determine the early optimal locations while second stage is to determine optimal sizes. A modified IEEE 13-bus three phase unbalanced radial distribution system is used to validate effectiveness of the proposed technique in solving the problem.