Real-Time Active Control of a Static Volt–Ampere Reactive Compensator for Concurrent Tracking of Grid Phase and Load Variations

This paper proposes a real-time active control strategy for a static volt–ampere reactive compensator (SVC) that can simultaneously respond to source phase variations and load fluctuations. Conventional SVC control schemes based on the total reactive power compensation suffer from degraded power factors and reduced power quality under unbalanced load conditions. In contrast, phase-wise control methods can maintain the power factor during load imbalance, which can result in reactive power overcompensation or undercompensation when source phase variations occur, leading to power factor deterioration. The proposed real-time active SVC control strategy effectively addresses both source phase variations and load fluctuations, thereby improving the power factor and overall power quality. PSIM version 2025 software-based simulations and digital signal processing-based hardware experiments were conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results confirm that the proposed control strategy successfully achieved the target power factor even under simultaneous source phase variations and unbalanced load conditions. These results demonstrate the high applicability of the proposed method to practical industrial power systems and renewable energy-integrated systems. The method is expected to contribute to the efficient design of large-capacity power quality control systems in the future.