Mitigation of Capacitor Switching Inrush Current Using Air Core Reactor

Abstract

The Reactive power compensation becomes essential to the industrial sector to reduce energy bills. Due to low cost and less maintenance, air-core reactors are prevalent nowadays. The industrial sector is revised now, and lots of automation was introduced by which the load becomes nonlinear. This nonlinear behavior put more challenges in the power sector. As the energy demand increases day by day, maintaining a healthy power system becomes crucial. The capacitor banks are used for reactive power compensation. These banks operate automatically To overcome the reactive power issues. It will energize when reactive power is required. The switching of the bank produces an inrush current in the system and may cause insulation failure or burning at the consumer end. This paper introduces the air-core reactor, which suppresses the magnitude of inrush current and protects the sensitive devices at the consumer end. The design of the air-core reactor and mitigation of inrush current is discussed using MATLAB simulation.