Optimal capacitor placement in radial distribution feeders using fuzzy-Differential Evolution

This paper presents an improved method for capacitor placement in radial distribution feeders to reduce the real power loss and to improve the voltage profile. The location of the nodes where the capacitors should be placed is decided by a set of rules given by the fuzzy expert system. The sizing of the capacitors is modeled by the objective function to obtain maximum savings using Differential Evolution (DE). A case study with an existing 15 bus rural distribution feeder is presented to illustrate the applicability of the algorithm. A comparison with the PSO is performed to show the improvement with the proposed algorithm.