Generalized Selective Harmonic Elimination Modulation for Transistor-Clamped H-Bridge Multilevel Inverter

This paper presents a simple approach for the selective harmonic elimination (SHE) of multilevel inverter based on the transistor-clamped H-bridge (TCHB) family. The SHE modulation is derived from the sinusoidal voltage-angle equal criteria corresponding to the optimized switching angles. The switching angles are computed offline by solving transcendental non-linear equations characterizing the harmonic contents using the Newton-Raphson method to produce an optimum stepped output. Simulation and experimental tests are conducted for verification of the analytical solutions. An Altera DE2 field-programmable gate array (FPGA) board is used as the digital controller device in order to verify the proposed SHE modulation in real-time applications. An analysis of the voltage total harmonic distortion (THD) has been obtained for multiple output voltage cases. In terms of the THD, the results showed that the higher the number of output levels, the lower the THD due to an increase number of harmonic orders being eliminated.