Hybrid Chaotic–Lévy Flight Artificial Bee Colony Optimization for Selective Harmonic Elimination in a 31-Level Asymmetric Cascaded H Bridge Inverter

Author

Yahaya Dinkiri Saidu, Ahmad Mohammed, Aliyu Hassan, Abubakar Hamisu, Idrissa Mohammed Godowoli

Abstract

 Harmonic distortion limits the power quality of multilevel inverters, and selective harmonic elimination (SHE) becomes a difficult, high-dimensional nonlinear problem as the number of voltage levels grows. This paper compares three Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) variants for computing the switching angles of a single-phase, 31-level asymmetric cascaded H-bridge inverter: a chaotic-map ABC, a Lévy-flight ABC, and a proposed hybrid that blends the two search mechanisms through a linearly annealed weight. The inverter, built from five H-bridges and 20 IGBTs, was modelled in MATLAB/Simulink and evaluated at six modulation indices (0.60–0.85), with and without an L-C-L output filter, using ten independent optimization runs per algorithm. The hybrid gave the lowest unfiltered total harmonic distortion (THD) at every modulation index, averaging 4.31 % against 4.95 % (chaotic) and 4.84 % (Lévy), and exceeded the 5 % IEEE 519-2022 limit at one modulation index instead of two or three. With the filter, hybrid THD fell to 0.04–0.22 % (mean 0.10 %), compared with means of 0.24 % and 0.19 % for the standalone variants. Nine of ten hybrid runs converged to final fitness values between 4.39×10−2 and 9.89×10−2; however, the hybrid was given a larger iteration budget (5,000 versus 100), so part of its advantage may reflect that budget. The asymmetric topology produced all 31 levels with 20 switches rather than about 60 for a symmetric design. The results suggest that combining chaotic and Lévy-flight search inside ABC is a promising route to low-distortion, standards-compliant high-level inverters.

Keywords

multilevel inverter; selective harmonic elimination; artificial bee colony; chaotic map; Lévy flight; total harmonic distortion; IEEE 519-2022

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References

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