A novel tracking control technique of capacitive switching for transient mitigation

The capacitive switching is frequently encountered in power systems for improving the voltage regulation profile. But, it requires special attention due to an accumulation of electrical charge. This accumulated charge after current interruption can cause a dielectric re-ignition in the switching device such as circuit breaker. When this process repeats, the interruption of capacitive currents causes overvoltage across the breaker. This transient across the switching device will be further intensified if appropriate preventive measures are not taken. Usually the resistance switching is employed to prevent the dielectric re-ignition. In this paper, a simple novel tracking control technique is proposed to prevent the transients/dielectric re-ignition of switching device. The proposed technique is compared with the conventional resistance switching for the validation. This paper also presents the selection criteria of resistors which will be very much useful for the practicing engineers.