December 10, 2008
Power Factor Correction
Posted by V.Narayan (Vee)
Lead Author, 100 Years of Maintenance: Practical Lessons from Three Lifetimes
Many years ago, when I was Engineering manager of a very large Auto parts maker, where we had over 3000 machine tools, we had a relatively low power factor, about 0.92 to 0.95, mainly due to the large number of induction motors and induction furnaces.
We added a number of power factor correction capacitors with auto cut-in cut-outs to keep the power factor between 0.96 and 0.98. This reduced copper losses, plus we paid less as the Utility charged us for KVAR as well.
