GA Based Selective Harmonic Elimination for Multilevel Inverter with Reduced Number of Switches

Multilevel inverters have been used in the power applications to get low total harmonic distortion (THD) in medium or high voltage levels. In order to get low THD in the output voltage, several techniques have been applied to multilevel inverter. One of these techniques is Selective Harmonic Elimination (SHE) that has an extensive research area in the field of power electronics. It is also an alternative to usual PWM techniques and includes nonlinear equations of stepped voltage waveform. In this paper, multilevel inverter with reduced number of switches which enables a reduction in the system cost has been proposed, and solution of SHE equations have been optimized by Genetic Algorithm (GA). The results of simulation and analysis have apparently proved that proposed GA based SHE technique eliminates desired harmonic order.