Using Differential Evolution to Solve the Harmonic Elimination Pulse Width Modulation for Five Level Cascaded Multilevel Voltage Source Inverter

Harmonic elimination pulse width modulation (HEPWM) method has been widely applied to remove harmonics due to its superior frequency spectra. It requires the solution of a set of transcendental nonlinear equations. Soft computing (SC) methods are extensively employed to solve this problem because of their effective global search ability. Differential evolution (DE) has surpassed most of the SC methods in diverse fields but it has never been utilized to solve this problem. In this work, DE is utilized to solve the HEPWM problem for five level cascaded multilevel voltage source inverter (MVSI). Simulation results have shown that the discontinuities of the HEPWM angle trajectories are nullified and a wider over-modulation range has been covered, enhancing the utilization of DC link voltages and extending the application of HEPWM for high power applications.