An application of PSO technique for harmonic elimination in a PWM inverter

Harmonic elimination problem in PWM inverter is treated as an optimization problem and solved using particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique. The derived equation for computation of total harmonic distortion (THD) of the output voltage of PWM inverter is used as the objective function in the PSO algorithm. The objective function is minimized to contribute the minimum THD in the voltage waveform and the corresponding switching angles are computed. The method is applied to investigate the switching patterns of both unipolar and bipolar case. While minimizing the objective function, the individual selected harmonics like 5th, 7th, 11th and 13th can be controlled within the allowable limits by incorporating the constraints in the PSO algorithm. The results of the unipolar case using five switching angles are compared with that of a recently reported work and it is observed that the proposed method is effective in reducing the voltage THD in a wide range of modulation index. The simulated results are also validated through suitable experiments.