International Journal of Engineering and Technology

This paper presents an efficient selective harmonics elimination method for a cascaded five-level inverter by using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method. The aim of this research is to eliminate selected low-order harmonics by solving non-linear equations using the developed PSO algorithm, while at the same time the fundamental component is retained efficiently. In order to find the efficient switching angles of a five- level cascaded inverter, a PSO algorithm has been developed to solve the non-linear equations. Instead of single switching, multiple switching in a quarter cycles has been introduced to increase the number of harmonic orders that should be eliminated. With the proposed method, the required switching angles are computed efficiently by PSO in order to eliminate low-order harmonics up to the 17th order from the inverter voltage waveform. The entire system has been simulated using PSIM software and a prototype of five -level cascaded inverter with Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) has been built in the laboratory. Performance of the proposed method for a five-level cascaded H-bridge inverter, based on simulation studies, is evaluated and experimentally verified.