What is difference between active power and reactive power?
While reactive power may be the ‘imaginary’ part of your complex power, that is just for mathematical purposes; reactive power is a real concept and while it’s hard to define it, there’s a few ways to think of it. What you want out of the system – what causes machines to operate – is real power, P. But in order to get that, you have to compensate for, or overcome, the reactive power of the system; in this way, it is like an efficiency. Try this: draw two sinusoidal waves, one for current and one for voltage. Normally, we say power, P, has the equation: P = VI This is only for systems where there is no reactive power, Q. Q arises when there is a phase difference between V and I (meaning that the waveforms do not line up – http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co… ). When you multiply waveforms, you have a maximum value when the two are in phase and line up perfectly. If there is a shift, the
