Capacitors in radial/mesh distribution systems are used to supply reactive power to minimize loss and
to improve the voltage profile. The appropriate placement of capacitors is also important to ensure that
system power losses and total investment capacitor costs are minimal. The capacitor placement problem
consists of finding specific sitting and sizing to install capacitor banks in an electrical distribution system.
Consequently, the losses are reduced due to the compensation of the reactive component of power flow.
This paper presents a new mixed integer nonlinear programming approach for capacitor placement
in radial/mesh distribution systems that determine the optimal sitting and sizing of capacitors with
an objective of reduction power loss and investment capacitor costs. The proposed method is applied
to 10, 34, and 85-bus radial distribution systems and CIVANLAR mesh distribution system. Variousscale application systems are used to compare the performance of the proposed method with the Fuzzy
reasoning, particle swim optimization (PSO), plant growth simulation algorithm (PGSA), and Heuristic
based. Numerical results show that the performance of the proposed MINLP method is better than the
other methods. Also, the MINLP method is superior to some other methods in terms of solution power
loss and costs.