AUTOMATIC POWER FACTOR CONTROL USING ARDUINO UNO

Abstract

The power quality of the AC system has become a great concern due to the rapidly increased use of inductive
loads, electronic equipment. We are wasting a part of the electrical energy everyday due to the lagging power factor in the
inductive loads we use. hence, there is an urgent need to avoid this wastage of energy, lower power factor result in poor
reliability, safety problems and high energy cost. The power factor of the power system is continuously changing due to
differences in the size and number of the equipment being used at a time. This makes it challenging to balance the inductive
and capacitive loads continuously. Many control methods for the Power Factor Correction (PFC) were proposed. This paper
presents a computationally accurate technique to design and development of a single-phase power factor correction using
Arduino Uno micro-controlling chip, The hardware implementation was developed by using Arduino Uno board, which uses
the ATmega328 as the Microcontroller, the proposed design has the skill to sense power factor efficiently and by using
proper procedure enough capacitors are switched on in order to compensate the reactive power, thus withdraw PF near to
unity as a result acquires higher efficiency and better quality AC output.