Hand-in-hand with the smart-grid paradigm development, power converters used in
high-power applications are facing important challenges related to efficiency and power quality.
To overcome these issues, the pre-programmed Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) methods have
been extensively applied to reduce the harmonic distortion with very low power switching losses
for high-power converters. Among the pre-programmed PWM techniques, Selective Harmonic
Elimination (SHE) has been the prevailing solution, but recently, Selective Harmonic Mitigation
(SHM) stands as a superior alternative to provide further control of the harmonic spectrum with
similar losses. However, the large computational burden required by the SHM method to find a
solution confines it as an off-line application, where the switching set valid solutions are pre-computed
and stored in a memory. In this paper, for the first time, a real-time implementation of SHM using an
off-the-shelf mid-range microcontroller is presented and tested. The Exchange Market Algorithm
(EMA), initially focused on optimizing financial transactions, is considered and executed to achieve
the SHM targets. The performance of the EMA-based SHM is presented showing experimental results
considering a reduced number of switching angles applied to a specific three-level converter, but the
method can be extrapolated to any other three-level converter topology.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación de España TEC2016-78430-RJunta de Andalucía P18-RT-1340Fondo Nacional de Investigación de Qatar NPRP 9-310-2-13