Abstract
Hand-in-hand with the smart-grid paradigm development, power converters used in high-power applications are facing important challenges related to efficiency and power quality. To overcome these issues, the pre-programmed Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) methods have been extensively applied to reduce the harmonic distortion with very low power switching losses for high-power converters. Among the pre-programmed PWM techniques, Selective Harmonic Elimination (SHE) has been the prevailing solution, but recently, Selective Harmonic Mitigation (SHM) stands as a superior alternative to provide further control of the harmonic spectrum with similar losses. However, the large computational burden required by the SHM method to find a solution confines it as an off-line application, where the switching set valid solutions are pre-computed and stored in a memory. In this paper, for the first time, a real-time implementation of SHM using an off-the-shelf mid-range microcontroller is presented and tested. The Exchange Market Algorithm (EMA), initially focused on optimizing financial transactions, is considered and executed to achieve the SHM targets. The performance of the EMA-based SHM is presented showing experimental results considering a reduced number of switching angles applied to a specific three-level converter, but the method can be extrapolated to any other three-level converter topology.
Highlights
The design of efficient and high-performance converters for high-power applications has been a hot research topic for decades
The resulting data were obtained using the optimization toolbox present in MATLAB numerical software with the same computational platform [38]. These results showed that the Exchange Market Algorithm (EMA) was an attractive alternative in order to reduce the computing time to perform for the first time a real-time implementation of Selective Harmonic Mitigation (SHM)
As mentioned previously, the proposed EMA-based SHM method could be implemented in any three-phase three-level converter by just determining the switching signals corresponding to the obtained voltage levels
Summary
The design of efficient and high-performance converters for high-power applications has been a hot research topic for decades. This interest is increasing year-by-year because power converters with higher nominal power are being designed for a large number of applications In this sense, new requirements in terms of high voltage and current ratings are leading to the use of medium-voltage high-power converter topologies for applications such as distributed generation in smart grids, high-power motor drives, the integration of Renewable Energies Systems (RES), and efficient energy transportation and distribution, among others. The switching angle sets are determined off-line due to the high computational burden to achieve proper values, and they are stored in look-up tables to be applied afterwards during the converter operation This is the reason why these methods are usually called pre-programmed. Thanks to applying an advanced meta-heuristic algorithm to look for a proper solution of the switching angle set, the high computational burden required to achieve it is overcome
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