PWM with Selective Harmonic Elimination Using Optimization Inspired on Earthquakes for AC Electric Drives

Manufacturing products mainly depends on AC electric drives, so it is extremely important to improve the performance of those. Moreover, power electronics systems have increased their performance using better semiconductors. However, additional electric drives' limitations can be tackled if the pulse-width modulation (PWM) is also improved by digital algorithms. This paper shows a PWM technique with selective harmonic elimination (SHE) to reduce odd harmonic in voltage source inverters (VSI) for induction motors. The presented optimization earthquake algorithm (EA) adopts the principle of the propagation of seismic waves P and S through an earth material composed of random densities to ensure the dynamic balance between exploration and exploitation and to ultimately reach the best solution in optimizing complex problems by searching for the optimum in the search space. The EA is used to find the optimum switching angles in order to reduce the harmonics that can damage the devices connected to the inverter. Experimental results validate the feasibility of the proposed PWM method in non-linear functions and engineering applications. Besides, the EA was capable of reducing the odd harmonics to control the velocity of a three-phase induction motor (IM) in the open loop through the VSI.