I understand that to correct the power factor you have to choose a capacitance such that the reactive power from the circuit is cancelled by the reactive power of the circuit using this method.
Circuit with power factor corrected:
Why does one place the capacitor in parallel (as opposed to series)?
Thanks in advance
Best Answer
Without the capacitor, the source has to provide all the energy (St): the actual energy consumed by the load (Pt) and the energy stored in the inductive part of the load (Qt). The inductive part makes the source supply a lot more current than necessary, since a lot of that current goes into setting up a magnetic field that stores some of the energy generated by the source.
With the capacitor in parallel, there is now an additional source of energy, which can take up some/all of the burden of supplying current to the inductive load (when it resists changes in current till it sets up its field), after which the source takes over again and recharges the capacitor. So the apparent power S (and thus energy) drawn from the source is reduced and is much closer to the true power P actually being used by the load.