Reducing Harmonic Distortion in a 5-Level Cascaded H-bridge Inverter Fed by a 12-Pulse Thyristor Rectifier

Abstract

This paper investigates a multilevel inverter with a capability that produces a wide voltage range with high quality. The selective harmonic elimination (SHE) method is considered for a single-phase 5-level cascaded H-bridge (CHB) inverter, in which the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm solves the nonlinear equations. However, eliminating the low-order harmonics has been challenging when a low range of output voltage is required. To surmount such challenges and access to a wide range of output voltage, an adjustable dc-link is introduced that allows the inverter to increase the modulation index, resulting in a significant decrease in total harmonic distortion (THD). In this paper, to regulate the dc-link voltage amount, a 12-pulse rectifier is employed to allow the inverter to produce the output voltage requirements with less distortion. To prove such claims, the PSO algorithm is modified to calculate the optimal angles, as a result, the switching angles are applied in SIMULINK MATLAB to generate a 5-level output voltage.