Simultaneous optimal placement and sizing of DSTATCOM and parallel capacitors in distribution networks using multi-objective PSO

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. The increase in electricity demands has increased the dimension and loading of today radial distribution feeders, which in turn would result in more losses and voltage drops. Such issues together with the demand for higher power quality has raised a need for modern power system management techniques such as using power electronic devices. Among, DSTATCOM is introduced as an effective solution for reactive power control in power distribution level. To make a better use of DSTATCOM in improving the network power quality, it should be sized and placed in accordance with parallel capacitors. A multi-objective optimization method is proposed in this paper to find the optimal location and size of DSTATCOM and parallel capacitors simultaneously. The cost of power losses, voltage profile and voltage stability are selected as objectives to be improved. The obtained results on the IEEE 33-node test system indicate that the proposed method satisfies the defined objectives and considerably improves the network operational characteristics.