A new method of selective harmonic elimination PWM for H-bridge cascaded multilevel inverter

Abstract

The quality of power of the cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter is affected due to harmonics. In this paper, a Selective Harmonic Elimination Pulse Width Modulation (SHE-PWM) method including controllable DC link voltage is introduced for the multilevel inverter. Novel mathematical modeling of SHE-PWM is established concerning the DC link voltage. Compared to ordinary selective harmonic elimination, the proposed method has an increased number of degrees of freedom because of its variable DC link voltage. On the other hand, the selective harmonic elimination utilizes constant DC link voltage. In the proposed scheme, the nonlinear equations are solved only once in the entire voltage range. As a result, the computational burden will decrease. Also, the Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) of the output voltage remains constant for various values of the operating points. The simulation is performed using Matlab Simulink and the comparison is performed with the conventional PWM method. It is intended that the proposed SHE-PWM based cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter provides better performance in terms of lower-order harmonics and less THD compares to conventional PWM method.