CC-LA: determining optimal switching angles in a cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter with the aid of binary cat...

A multilevel inverter (MLI) is a power electronic device that includes the capability to offer the preferred voltage level (alternating) in the output. Accordingly, selective harmonic elimination (SHE) or pulse width modulation (PWM) methodologies were deployed widely. However, these techniques are not appropriate in a certain situation which involves a huge number of switching angles if an excellent primary guess is not obtainable. Hence, this paper intends to determine the optimum switching angles of a cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter (CH-MLI) using a hybrid lion optimization algorithm (LOA) and binary cat swarm algorithm (BCSO). The objective of optimizing the switching angle is to generate the needed fundamental voltage and minimize the harmonic content. This is done by resolving the transcendental equations characterizing the harmonic content. The switching angles, i.e., α₁, α₂....  α_m, should be tuned in such a way that it satisfies the condition [Formula: see text]. Here, the optimal tuning of switching angles is done by the proposed binary cat cubpool-based lion algorithm (BCC-LA). In addition, the analysis is done for the proposed method over the state-of-the-art models in terms of total harmonic distortion (THD), and the impact of varying loads is also examined for the proposed and traditional models, and thus, the superior performance of the proposed model is validated.