Firing Angles Calculation of Multilevel Inverters using Optimization Techniques

Abstract

Power electronics field is nowadays growing as a strong and most widely used field in numerous applications such as telecommunication, transportation, aerospace and industrial applications. Power converters such as multilevel inverters are highly recommended in the industrial applications due to the prominent features and advantages offered by these. Some of the advantages are minimum total harmonic distortion, minimum switching losses, better output voltage quality and power quality etc. But the designing of a multilevel inverter system is a very crucial step and it should consider the parameters like the choice of suitable topology of multilevel inverter, number of levels used in multilevel inverter, firing schemes and selection of the optimization techniques. Optimization techniques are required to obtain the optimized firing angles for the semiconductor devices used in the multilevel inverter system, Proper choice of firing angles leads to lower harmonics and lesser total harmonic distortion in multilevel inverter system. Therefore, the foremost challenge with the designing of a multilevel inverter system is the selection of optimum firing angles for the switching devices. In this research paper, two algorithms i.e. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm and Genetic Algorithm (GA) have been used for finding the optimum firing angles of a seven level Cascaded H-bridge (CHB) inverter.