Mitigation of Harmonics Using Novel Sector-Based Switching Pattern Space Vector Pulse Width Modulation

Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) driven power converters are widely used in realizing the function of rectification and inversion in renewable and emerging power applications. They play a key role in tying renewable energy sources of solar and wind to conventional energy grid systems. Such emergying styles of power systems are referred to as Distributed Generation (DG) or energy mix. The PWM-based switching devices are also sources for injecting harmonics to degrade the quality level in this emerging style of DG systems causing steady-state waveform distortion. Thus power converters operated by finely tuned PWM play an important role in mitigating the voltage waveform distorting harmonics and consequently improving the stability of the system. This paper presents the mitigation of harmonic contents by reproducing as a novel space vector-based switching pattern of SVPWM. In this work, the proposed switching pattern will have a DC link RMS current equal to or less than that of a conventional SVPWM current under the same switching frequency (SF), load, L-C filter, DC bus voltage, and Modulation Index (MI). The results include a 13.43% improvement in Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) at relatively high modulation indices. The Weighted Total Harmonic Distortion (WTHD) has also improved by 47.37% and the number of thyristors has been reduced lowering switching losses. The Matlab-Simulink simulation results have been experimentally verified with an Advanced Digital Analog Learning Module (ADALM M2k)-based experimental setup, improving the proposed SVPWM THD by 13.49%. The conventional and proposed SVPWM performance comparison is done by obtaining Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) by driving a two-level three-phase voltage source inverter.