A GSA-Based Modified SVC Switching Scheme for Load Balancing and Source Power Factor Improvement

An improved switching scheme for static VAr compensators (SVCs) that have fixed capacitor-thyristor-controlled reactors (FC-TCRs) for load balancing and power factor improvement has been addressed in this paper. The proposed control scheme can eliminate negative-sequence current caused by unbalanced load while improving the source power factor simultaneously. Thus total current supplied by the source can be minimized along with improvement of the load voltage profile. As the switching of TCR can introduce additional harmonics in the line, an optimized switching function is adopted in the proposed scheme for minimum injected harmonics without using an external filter. The gravitational search algorithm has been used for obtaining the optimized switching angle. The proposed scheme has been verified through proper simulations backed by suitable experimental results on a practical system.