Red deer algorithm based harmonic mitigation for asymmetric cascaded multilevel inverters

This study aims to find the optimum switching angles in an asymmetric cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter (CHB-MLI) powered by photovoltaic (PV) panels. Red Deer Algorithm (RDA), a newly developed algorithm, has been applied to solve the selective harmonic elimination (SHE) equations. The calculated switching angles are used to obtain a 19-level output voltage using only 3 different amplitude DC sources and 3 H-bridge modules in Matlab/Simulink. The simulation results show that the RDA can accurately and quickly suppress selected harmonics while controlling the fundamental voltage with less than 0.06% error in the modulation index range of 0.2 to 1.0. The proposed RDA optimization has eliminated the selected harmonics without complex analytical calculations and reduced the total harmonic distortion.