Selective Harmonic Elimination in a Cascaded H-Bridge Multilevel Inverter fed by High-Frequency Isolated DC-DC Converter

Abstract

In recent years, the use of multilevel inverter has become popular due to its many advantages. Due to the popularity of multilevel inverters in industries and in applications that require a wide range of voltages, there have been many challenges to achieve high-quality voltage. Many pieces of research have been done to solve the problem of annoying harmonics in multilevel inverters. In this study, pulse width modulation (PWM) has been proposed as a switching method. Using the Selective Harmonic Elimination (SHE) technique, the inverter switching can be carried out in low frequency, and also, this method can reduce the annoying harmonics significantly. However, in the lower modulation index, eliminating such harmonics is challenging, resulting in a considerable increase in output voltage distortion. This study suggests a way to solve the problem. In this research, eliminating selected harmonics in a multilevel inverter with variable DC links is proposed. The DC-link variable method in this study is to use a high-frequency isolated DC-DC converter. The proposed method is verified on a 5-level Cascaded H-Bridge (CHB) inverter using the SHE-PWM method solved by particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm.