Most Valuable Player based selective harmonic elimination in a cascaded H-bridge inverter for wide operating range

Selective Harmonic Elimination PWM (SHEPWM) is a classical method of voltage control of the inverter while eliminating the undesirable lower order harmonics for low-frequency applications. Multivariable non-linear equations often result in SHE modulation scheme. In this work, a Most Valuable Player Algorithm (MVPA) has been applied to solve the non-linear SHE equations for the elimination of lower order harmonics in a cascaded H bridge multilevel inverter. The MVPA algorithm shows better convergence characteristics and wider modulation control compared to some popular meta-heuristic optimization methods. Optimized switching angles have been obtained for 5, 7 and 9 level inverters for different modulation index (MI) from 0.05 to 1. The Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) for the output voltage was found to be smoother compared to the powerful Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm for modulation index greater than 0.6. And for modulation index greater than 0.8, MVPA scores better than DE in terms of THD. Experimentally, the performance of MVPA has also been validated for 1-phase 5, 7 and 9 level cascaded H-bridge inverter and 5th, 5th and 7th, 5th, 7th, and 11th harmonic was eliminated respectively.