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Ender.uNF posted:I'm still trying to understand reactive and PF and revise it into a layman's explanation. Suppose this experiment: Grab a long, relatively narrow piece of paper (say 4 feet by 2 inches or something) and lay it flat on a ground. Put some kind of weight on near one end of it, and grab the other end in your hand. The goal is to lift your end of the paper up and down to make a wave that ripples towards the other end, and the idea is to use the energy in that ripple to push the weight forward, away from you. Chances are that experiment won't work really well, but one way it might work is: you make a wave, it ripples to the weighted end, it pushes the weight forward just a little bit, and a wave reflects back towards you. Unfortunately the paper is lossy, so the reflected wave probably won't make it all the way back to you, but that's kind of what goes on in an AC power system. The apparent power is what you (the generator) put into making the wave. The real power is that consumed by the weight to push it forward, plus the amount lost to the paper. The reactive power is the portion of the wave that is reflected back towards you. As mentioned earlier, reactive power isn't really generated and consumed on average, it's just power that sloshes around between two points in the system. In the worst case, it sloshes between the load and the generator. Now, even though reactive power isn't consumed, its existence cuts into your generation and transmission capacity. So if you have a power generation system that's running at 10% capacity, with a PF of 0.5, it doesn't matter much because you're no where near your capacity limits. If you're running at 95% capacity with a PF of 0.5, you really want to improve your power factor since you're operating dangerously close to capacity, and it's contributing significantly to transmission losses (which increases the closer you get to your transmission capacity).
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Sep 7, 2011 19:00
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| # ¿ May 6, 2024 21:19 |
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