A Simple Analytical Technique for Optimal Capacitor Placement in Radial Distribution Systems

This article presents a simple and efficient analytical method to determine the optimal sizing and location of capacitor in radial distribution systems to minimize the total power losses and improve the overall voltage profile. The proposed method consists of two stages. The first stage is devoted to determine the optimal location of capacitor where, the optimum capacitor size is determined in the second stage. Load flow analysis is performed by the forward/backward sweep algorithm. To verify the precision of the proposed method, the algorithm is tested on the IEEE 34-bus and 69-bus radial distribution systems with possible load variations from light load (50% of rated load) to overload (160% of rated load). The simulation results of the proposed method are compared with the other existing techniques and the results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method to determine the optimal sizing and location of capacitor in radial distribution systems.