Application of PSO for selective harmonic elimination in a PWM AC/AC voltage regulator

In this paper the particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique is used to find an optimal solution for the selective harmonic elimination (SHE) problem in PWM AC/AC voltage regulators. For this kind of voltage controllers, SHE leads to nonlinear and transcendental equations; as a result, solving them by conventional numerical methods highly depends on proper selection of initial values. The proposed PSO based algorithm affectively computes the required switching instances to eliminate pre-specified harmonics from the output voltage. Problem formulation, objective function and obtained switching angels trajectories for eliminating different sets of harmonics are presented. Simulation results using Matlab/Simulink are presented to confirm the theoretical results.