Tunable Capacitor Banks?
Tunable Capacitor Banks?
(OP)
Hi everyone,
A recent discussion with an engineer here got me to thinking - are there such things as tunable capacitor banks? IE you have a bank of caps and depending on the inductive properties of the load (which should be able to be measured by probing the voltage and current waveforms and measureing the phase angle) you turn on/off a bunch of switches/relays that place caps in series/parellel, which give you an equivalent capacitance to match the inductance, etc, giving you a purely real load as seen by your source.
Does such a thing exist? If not, why
A recent discussion with an engineer here got me to thinking - are there such things as tunable capacitor banks? IE you have a bank of caps and depending on the inductive properties of the load (which should be able to be measured by probing the voltage and current waveforms and measureing the phase angle) you turn on/off a bunch of switches/relays that place caps in series/parellel, which give you an equivalent capacitance to match the inductance, etc, giving you a purely real load as seen by your source.
Does such a thing exist? If not, why






RE: Tunable Capacitor Banks?
RE: Tunable Capacitor Banks?
RE: Tunable Capacitor Banks?
As apowerengr mentions, you can get stepless control with a synchronous condensor or with an underloaded synchronous motor.
respectfully
RE: Tunable Capacitor Banks?
GO PLACIDLY, AMIDST THE NOISE AND HASTE-Desiderata
RE: Tunable Capacitor Banks?
RE: Tunable Capacitor Banks?
How close you want to be to "purely resistive" would depend on how many thyristors you could afford to install.
Switching inductors mid cycle is easier on equipment than switching capacitors, so a Static Var Compensator might use a few banks of switched capacitors for rough control and then a thyristor controlled reactor for the fine tuning.