Microcontroller Based Automatic Power Factor Correction in Mines

Routray, Smruti Suman (2015) Microcontroller Based Automatic Power Factor Correction in Mines. MTech thesis.

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Abstract

With the mining industry moving from traditional manual methods to the advanced mechanised mining, the focus is also shifting to the energy efficiency of the equipment and system being employed. Most of the equipment used in mining like shovel, drill, elevator, continues miner, conveyor, pumps etc. runs on electricity. Electric energy being the only form of energy which can be easily converted to any other form plays a vital role for the growth of any industry. The Power Factor gives an idea about the efficiency of the system to do useful work out of the supplied electric power. A low value of power factor leads to increase is electric losses and also draws penalty by the utility. Significant savings in utility power costs can be realized by keeping up an average monthly power factor close to unity. The work carried out is concerned with developing power factor correction equipment based on embedded system which can automatically monitor the power factor in the mining electrical system and take care of the switching process to maintain a desired level of power factor which fulfils the standard norms. The Automatic Power Factor Correction (APFC) device developed is based on embedded system having 89S52 microcontroller at its core. The voltage and current signal from the system is sampled and taken as input to measure the power factor and if it falls short of the specified value by utility, then the device automatically switch on the capacitor banks to compensate for the reactive power. After employing the correction equipment the targeted power factor of 0.95 is achieved and the increase in power factor varied from 9% to 19% based on the combination of load. There is also a decrease of 1.7% in the total energy consumption due to reduction in load current. The economic analysis for power factor improvement considering the data from a local coal mine suggested the payback period to be around 9 months if the correction equipment is implemented

Item Type:Thesis (MTech)
Uncontrolled Keywords:Power Factor, Reactive Power, Microcontroller, PT, CT, Capacitor Bank
Subjects:Engineering and Technology > Mining Engineering > Mining Industry
Divisions: Engineering and Technology > Department of Mining Engineering
ID Code:7799
Deposited By:Mr. Sanat Kumar Behera
Deposited On:16 Sep 2016 17:31
Last Modified:16 Sep 2016 17:31
Supervisor(s):Tripathy, D P

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