Wednesday 21 October 2015

How does a bad power factor affect batteries with inverters?


Let's say I'm using a 100% efficient battery (AC battery, so there's an inverter in front of it) to power a motor with a power factor of 0.5. Let's also assume the inverter cannot correct the power factor for some reason (normally they can, right?) and is 100% efficient. Let's also assume 0 resistance in the power lines.


If I hook up the battery to a 1 HP motor with 100% efficiency, will the battery start losing more than 1 HP? I would assume not since the inverter's job is just to convert power from one form (DC) to another (AC) and it doesn't take power to have current with 0 voltage, correct (this would happen every cycle because the voltage and current wave form are out of sync due to the bad power factor)?


The only concern I have is that batteries have a limited amount of current, so if current was always being extracted from the battery (even at 0 voltage due to a bad power factor), the battery would still be losing potential power.




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