A Current-Reference-Based Selective Harmonic Current Mitigation PWM Technique to Improve the Performance of Cascaded H-Bridge Multilevel Active Rectifiers

In this paper, a selective harmonic current mitigation pulsewidth modulation (SHCM-PWM) technique with low switching frequencies is proposed for grid-connected cascaded H-bridge multilevel rectifiers to fully meet harmonic requirements within extended harmonic spectrum. In the proposed technique, instead of using the voltage references to calculate switching angles for the rectifier as in conventional selective harmonic elimination-PWM (SHE-PWM) or selective harmonic mitigation-PWM (SHM-PWM), current references are used to compensate the current harmonics due to both grid voltage harmonics and rectifier input voltage harmonics so as to meet the current harmonic requirements and total demand distortion within the whole harmonic spectrum. Furthermore, the techniques to design the critical parameters including switching frequency, the highest harmonic order that can be mitigated using the proposed current-reference-based technique, and the coupling inductance that can attenuate the current harmonic orders above the highest order are investigated. With the same switching frequency, the proposed SHCM-PWM technique uses smaller coupling inductance to meet higher orders of current harmonic requirements than the conventional SHE-PWM technique. Finally, simulations and experiments were conducted to validate the proposed technique.