Selective harmonic elimination of a multilevel voltage source inverter using whale optimization algorithm

Abstract

In this paper, the whale optimization algorithm is proposed for harmonics elimination in a cascaded multilevel inverter. In selective harmonic elimination pulse width modulation, the selected low-order harmonics are eliminated by solving nonlinear equations, while the fundamental of output waveform is adjusted to a desired value. In this paper, whale optimization algorithm is applied to a 7-level cascaded H-bridge inverter to solve the equations. Also, it was validated by experimental results, since this algorithm has an ability to search in entire solution space, the probability of catching a global best solution is very high. This method has higher accuracy and probability of convergence than the genetic algorithm. The optimization and comparison of whale optimization algorithm and genetic algorithm have been done in MATLAB software. A 1 kW prototype of this converter is built and the results are presented. The effectiveness and the theoretical analysis of this method are verified through both simulation and experimental results.