Abstract: Electric energy being the only form of energy which can be easily converted to any other form plays a vital role for the growth of any industry. The Power Factor gives an idea about the efficiency of the system to do useful work out of the supplied electric power. To improve the power factor to desired level, reactive power compensators are used in the substations. The most common used device is capacitor bank which are switched on and off manually based on the requirement. The work carried out is concerned with developing power factor correction equipment based on embedded system which can automatically monitor the power factor in the electrical system and take care of the switching process to maintain a desired level of power factor which fulfils the standard norms. The voltage and current signal from the system is sampled and taken as input to measure the power factor and if it falls short of the specified value by utility, then the device automatically switch on the capacitor banks to compensate for the reactive power. The number of capacitors switched on or off is decided by the microcontroller based on the system power factor and the targeted power factor. The measurement and monitoring of three different possible load types suggested that only the inductive loads required power factor correction.

Keywords: APFC, Capacitors, Atmega 328p.

| DOI: 10.17148/IJIREEICE.2021.9419