Natural Balancing of the Neutral Point Potential of a Three-Level Inverter with Improved Firefly Algorithm

Modern power systems driven by high-power converters have become inevitable in view of the ever increasing demand for electric power. The total power loss can be reduced by limiting the switching losses in such power converters; increased power efficiency can thus be achieved. A reduced switching frequency that is less than a few hundreds of hertz is applied to power converters that produce output waveforms with high distortion. Selective harmonic elimination pulse width modulation (SHEPWM) is an optimized low switching frequency pulse width modulation method that is based on offline estimation. This method can pre-program the harmonic profile of the output waveform over a range of modulation indices to eliminate low-order harmonics. In this paper, a SHEPWM scheme for three-phase three-leg neutral point clamped inverter is proposed. Aside from eliminating the selected harmonics, the DC capacitor voltages at the DC bus are also balanced because of the symmetrical pulse pattern over a quarter cycle of the period. The technique utilized in the estimation of switching angles involves the firefly algorithm (FA). Compared with other techniques, FA is more robust and entails less computation time. Simulation in the MATLAB/SIMULINK environment and experimental verification in the very large scale integration platform with Spartan 6A DSP are performed to prove the validity of the proposed technique.