DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF MICROCONTROLLER BASED LOAD MONITORING AND INTELLIGENT POWER FACTOR CORRECTION DEVICE
The presence of reactive elements in electrical or electronics appliances results in reactive power, leading to less than unity power factor which is undesirable. Power factor correction (PFC) is a technique for counteracting the undesirable effects of electric loads that create a power factor that is less than one. A PFC of electric circuit using an Atmega 328P Microcontroller was presented. A load monitoring circuit comprising of voltage and current sensing circuit together with a zero crossing detector circuit was designed. An intelligently varying capacitor switching circuit was used to correct the instantaneous load variations in the circuit. A hardware implementation of the circuit was successfully implimented with a rapid response time and on-demand correction capacitive value and switching. This work could be extended to studying a sustainable and cost efficient power systems for smart homes and smart cities as well as any system requiring continuous energy utilization for achieving energy cost reduction.
Authors : Abubakar, U.B., Usman, A., Dauda, Y., Abideen, A.I., Muhammad, S.A. and Abdelfattah, A.A.
Category : Open Access Volume (Issue) : 11(1) Date Uploaded : 7th May 2025