Photovoltaic Inverters Optimisation

Multilevel inverters are widely used in solar energy generation systems consist of various photovoltaic generators. These converters deliver distorted output waveforms. There are trascendental equations characterizing the harmonic content but the degree of the polynomial increases with the number of DC sources or the number of harmonics to be eliminated. Also, the solutions are discontinuous in some points. In this paper, a way is proposed to minimize the output harmonics of a multilevel inverter, especially those of lower order. The Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm used to minimize the Total Harmonic Distortion, subject to restrictions on the harmonic content allowed. The appropriate switching angles can be calculated to eliminate low order harmonics. The proposed method has been succesfully applied to a cascaded multilevel converter of seven levels. Then, this method can be extended to more levels inverters. In case of a real-time application, the method can be useful because the switching angles can be stored.