APPLICATION OPERATION OF CAPACITOR PLACEMENT IN SYNERGEE VERSION 4.0

APPLICATION OPERATION OF CAPACITOR PLACEMENT IN SYNERGEE VERSION 4.0
How is Capacitor Placement used in synergee software?

Capacitor placement operates in a cumulative manner, starting from base case. The application first finds the most advantageous location for a capacitor, based on user-specified constraints. This location is offered as the first recommendation. You can then temporarily “place” a recommended capacitor in your model and have the analysis look for the next best location to further improve performance. The process can continue in this manner until one of the following occurs:

• The application cannot improve system performance with another capacitor.
• The application has placed the maximum number of capacitors, based on your capacitor placement analysis settings.

Capacitor Placement always tries to place the largest-size capacitor first, based on the sizes you selected for the analysis. The application then moves sequentially through the sizes until it reaches the smallest one, or until the maximum number of capacitors has been placed.

The following are the field in the Capacitor Placement module that needs to be specified:

Sizes
Select the capacitor sizes that you want the capacitor placement analysis to consider. The analysis begins with the largest enabled size and works in a cumulative fashion towards the smallest, improving the base case further with each placement.

Placement Sections
Select the phase line type that you want the Capacitor Placement analysis to consider. Available choices are Only single-phase lines, Only three-phase lines, and Single or Three-phase lines. You can also select the Allow placement on cables check box to consider cables during the Capacitor Placement Analysis.

Limits for placement
Specify length and distance constraints to limit which sections will qualify for placement. These options may be useful for “stub” or “dummy” sections.

Maximum Device Power Factor
Specify the maximum power factor you want SynerGEE to accept at the capacitor being placed. For example, -80% indicates that you are willing to accept a leading power facto of 0.8 or 80%.

Maximum Feeder/SubTran Power Factor
Specify the maximum power factor you want Synergee to accept at the feeder or subtran after a capacitor is placed. For example, -80% indicates that you are willing to accept a leading power factor of 0.8 or 80%.

Add to Existing banks only

Select this check box to restrict the Capacitor Placement analysis to only consider sections that already have capacitors modelled. Selecting this option will temporarily turn off all existing capacitors before the analysis, and restores the original settings when the analysis is complete. When a capacitor is already modelled, the kvar of the placed capacitor is simply added to the kvar of the existing capacitor.

Capacitor Placement only places capacitors that have fixed kvar values. If the application places a new capacitor on a section that already has a capacitor, then the kvar values of the new capacitor are simply added to the fixed kvar values of the existing capacitor. Adding kvar in this manner is necessary because SynerGEE only allows one capacitor per line section.

Once finished, the list of recommendations is presented in the SynerGEE Placement Tool editor, in order of increasing performance, as they were found by SynerGEE. At this point, Capacitor Placement has made no changes to your model. SynerGEE is simply presenting its recommendations, and you may choose to implement them as desired.

The cumulative process results in a form of optimization known as local optimization. It does not find a theoretical global optimum by considering all capacitor sizes and all locations simultaneously. Instead, it operates by moving from the base case to the next best state, then to the next best state, and so on. This approach provides results that are more realistic and useful than a global optimization method.