Capacitor Switching Transients: Analysis and Proposed Technique for Identifying Capacitor Size and Location

This paper deals with the analysis of transients initiated by the switching of shunt capacitors in power networks. These transients will propagate through the network along the transmission elements and will, accordingly, be felt at other locations far from the capacitors, such as load terminals. This can lead to adverse effects on the supply quality at those load buses. Based on a typical radial system, the distributed-parameter analysis will give analytical expressions for the expected transient voltages at the load terminals in terms of both the size and location of the switched capacitor. In its second part, this paper presents simple closed-form expressions for the accurate identification of the shunt capacitor’s size and location, in terms of easily measurable parameters of the voltage signal at the load terminals.