Title: Improving power quality with reducing output harmonics for electric vehicle applications by using bacteria foraging algorithm

Authors: Murtaza Farsadi; Monireh Ahmadi

Addresses: Department of Electrical Engineering, Urmia University, Urmia 5756151818, Iran ' Department of Electrical Engineering, Urmia Branch, Islamic Azad University, Urmia 5715944867, Iran

Abstract: The requirements for the power inverter of the electric vehicles (EVs) include high peak power, low output harmonics, inexpensive circuit and low continuous power rating. The purpose of this paper is to reduce the output harmonics of a cascade H-bridge multilevel inverter for EV applications by means of a bacterial foraging algorithm (BFA). In this study, the modified BFA is proposed as a technique for solving non-linear equations of selective harmonics elimination technique for determining optimal switching angles in multilevel inverters. The proposed optimisation method enhances the convergence rate and accuracy in dealing with complex problems with high dimensions, by adding improved and dynamic aspects to its main algorithm. Also, in this paper, a lower number of DC voltage sources have been used in the provided inverter compared with common multilevel inverters; this has resulted in the reduction in price of the inverter. Simulation results on various conditions were carried out using PSCAD/EMTDC software.

Keywords: electric vehicles; cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverters; power quality; modulation method; switching angles; output harmonics; bacterial foraging optimisation; BFO; power inverters; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEHV.2016.076956

International Journal of Electric and Hybrid Vehicles, 2016 Vol.8 No.1, pp.41 - 60

Received: 26 May 2015
Accepted: 01 Nov 2015
Published online: 08 Jun 2016 *

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