Simulation evaluation of capacitor bank impact on increasing supply current for alumunium production

DC current supply to power the electrolysis process in producing aluminium at PT Indonesia Asahan Aluminium (Persero) is about 193 kA. At this condition, the load voltage regulator (LVR) transformer generates 0.89 lagging power factor. By adding the capacitor bank to reduce the harmonic distortion, it is expected that the supply current will increase. This paper evaluates capacitor bank installation impact on the system by using ETAP 12.0 simulation. It has been obtained that by installing 90 MVAR capacitor bank in the secondary part of LVR, the power factor is corrected about 8% and DC current increases about 13.5%.