Carrier wave optimization for multi-level photovoltaic system to improvement of power quality in industrial environments based on Salp swarm algorithm

Abstract The use of multi-level inverters is increasing in different structures, high power and medium power applications due to advantages such as low switching losses, harmonic distortion and electromagnetic interference at the output which could be used in microgrid systems. A microgrid can be defined as groups of renewable energy sources such as photovoltaic and wind turbine i.e. The switching technique for inverter control plays a significant role in reducing or eliminating the harmonics of inverter output voltage and reducing the switching losses. To minimise the distortion of the output voltage of the cascaded H bridge multi-level inverter due to low-order harmonics, an optimization method used for frequency selection, i.e. the carrier wave amplitude in the SPWM strategy within this study. The proposed method is called OSPWM, which employs a new optimization method based on the Salp swarm algorithm. The proposed method applied to a cascade H bridge five-level inverter. The simulation results show the reduction of the low-frequency harmonics amplitude and THD output voltage by optimizing the OSPWM carrier wave parameters with the optimization algorithm. The proposed method also compared with the classical SPWM method.