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Motivated by the development of power semiconductor technologies, flexible ac transmission systems (FACTS) devices and their penetration in the field of electrical power systems, an educational challenge in complementing theoretical knowledge with practical experience is recognized. In this paper, the design and implementation of a lab-scale hardware and software setup is presented. Three small-scale devices, including a static VAr compensator (SVC) unit, a transmission line model, and a substation, are developed. The SVC unit is validated by obtaining its operating characteristic. The lab setup is presented as a platform to carry out different experiments related to the SVC operation. Safety considerations in the design are discussed. Steady-state and dynamic analysis are presented showing the consistency between theory and practice. The potential use of small SVC units on low-voltage distributed generation schemes is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the growth of electricity demands and transactions in power markets, existing power networks need to be enhanced in order to increase their loadability. The problem of determining the best locations for network reinforcement can be formulated as a mixed discrete-continuous nonlinear optimization problem (MDCP). The complexity of the problem makes extensive simulations necessary and the computational requirement is high. An ordinal optimization (OO) technique is proposed in this paper to solve the MDCP involving two types of flexible ac transmission systems (FACTS) devices, namely static var compensator (SVC) and thyristor controlled series compensator (TCSC), for system loadability enhancement. In this approach, crude models are proposed to cope with the complexity of the problem and speed up the simulations with high alignment confidence. Test results based on a practical power system confirm that the proposed models permit the use of OO-based approach for finding good enough solutions with less computational efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]