Power Quality Improvement in a 7 level Inverter using Selective Harmonic Elimination

Multilevel Inverters are preferred in low and medium power applications. Multilevel inverters have advantage of ease of control, and therefore they are widely used in Industries and Electric Vehicles. The output voltage of these inverters contains too many harmonics which causes heating and ultimately breakdown of the entire system and that leads to huge financial losses. The work carried out here describes a method to reduce the magnitude of lower order harmonics using a technique called Selective Harmonic Elimination (SHE). Genetic Algorithm (GA) is applied to calculate the firing angles for the switches in the single phase 7-level inverter. The behavior of the inverter is tested on a single phase Induction motor.