Banca de DEFESA: DIEGO JOSE DA SILVA

OPTIMAL ALLOCATION OF CAPACITOR BANKS IN DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS USING A HIBRID ALGORITHM

The electric power system is commonly divided in, generation, transmission and distribution energy. The major part of the energy is transported by the transmission lines and delivered by distributors that transport energy to consumers. The great amount of power losses, which are divided into technical and commercial losses. Technical losses can be minimized by means of the optimal placement and dimensioning of capacitor banks, which also contribute to the control of the voltage profile. The placement of capacitor banks in the electric power system consists of defining the number of banks, the optimal size, and local to be installed that will minimize technical losses and investment. The problem is usually formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINPL) problem and is subject to the following constraints: load flow constraints, bus voltage constraints, current limit constraints; and others. The problem has been solved by various techniques the classical, and also ap-proximate methods. This work presents an application of the bio-inspired technique (FPA) and an exhaustive search (ES) algorithm to solve the problem of optimal placement and size of capacitor banks in distribution networks. In the iterative process, The FPA algorithm indicates the buses to place CB and ES to obtains the optimal capacities of CB. The method is implemented in MATLAB(R). Tests performed in distribution networks available in the literature have been validated with other techniques found in the specialized literature and shown good performance compared to them.