IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 20, NO.

2, APRIL 2005 1209

Centroid PWM Technique for Inverter Harmonics Elimination

R. A. Villarreal-Ortiz, M. Hernández-Angeles, Member, IEEE, C. R. Fuerte-Esquivel, Member, IEEE, and
R. O. Villanueva-Chávez

Abstract—A novel harmonic elimination pulsewidth-modulated

(PWM) technique for static dc/ac power inverters is proposed
in this letter. The technique determines the commutation angles
based on equilibrium points; which are obtained by calculating
the Centroid of the area under the curve of the sinusoidal function
of voltage, within a time interval defined by the method of equal
areas.
Index Terms—Harmonic elimination, inverters, pulsewidth-
modulated (PWM) techniques.

I. INTRODUCTION

T HE LOW-ORDER harmonic elimination in dc/ac power

inverters can be achieved by the application of pulsewidth-
modulated (PWM) techniques. These techniques calculate the
commutation angles such that the inverter ac output voltage
is generated with the minor contain of low-order harmonics. Fig. 1. Switching angles and equilibrium points.
Furthermore, they provide a linear control of the fundamental
voltage signal. is to apply the equal areas method which divides the half period
Some of the techniques more commonly used are the har- of a sinusoidal signal in time sections. The area under sinu-
monic elimination PWM (HEPWM) and equals areas PWM soidal curve in each time section is evaluated by
(EAPWM) [1], which determine the commutation angles by
solving a set of nonlinear equations. From this technique,
Area (1)
other commutation schemes have been derived such as the
spatial vector modulation (SVM) [2] and HEPWM combined
with the theory of regular sampling [3], which improve the where is the peak voltage of the sinusoidal signal, and
computation time associated to the firing angle assessment. and are the limits of the sinusoidal function section under
In order to avoid the solution of nonlinear equations, other analysis. Based on the areas computed by (1), rectangular pulses
PWM techniques apply Walsh functions [4], which solve a of voltages are generated whose areas are equal to their respec-
set of algebraic equations. In this letter, a new technique is tive sinusoidal areas. The rectangular-wide pulse
proposed to determine the location of the commutation angles corresponds to the commutation interval, in the respective time
based on a closed-form equation derived from the centroid section . For a given commutation interval, the
algorithm. Hence, it is not necessary to solve a set of nonlinear switching angles are computed based on the equilibrium point of
equations or algebraic equations to assess the inverter com- its corresponding sinusoidal area. The aforementioned method-
mutation angles. In addition, the proposed technique has the ology is shown schematically in Fig. 1. The equilibrium points
capacity to reduce the low-order harmonic content and handle are computed by the centroid method as described below.
the fundamental amplitude signal in the whole rank of inverter The centroid of the th sinusoidal area is the point .
output voltage. Based on the aforementioned characteristics, Based on Fig. 2, it is possible to obtain a closed-form equation
the proposed method is suitable for online control applications. which computes the point [5] as in (2) and (3), shown at
the top of the next page. The centroid PWM (CPWM) technique
II. PROPOSED METHOD DESCRIPTION only uses the coordinate.
In this section, we describe the technique to determine the The computed centroid coordinate of the th sinusoidal
commutation angles based on equilibrium points. The first step area corresponds to the centroid coordinate of its associated
rectangular pulse of voltage, as shown in Fig. 2. Furthermore,
this centroid is located at the center of the rectangular pulse.
Manuscript received October 1, 2003. This work was supported in part by Hence, the locations of switching angles, which define the com-
the Instituto Tecnológico de Morelia and in part by the Consejo del Sistema Na-
cional de Educación Technologica (COSNET) under Ph.D. scholarship 99311P. mutation interval , are automatically established
Paper no. PESL-00121-2003. by the following equations:
R. A. Villarreal-Ortiz, M. Hernández-Angeles, and R. O. Villanueva-Chávez
are with Instituto Tecnológico de Morelia, Morelia, Michoacán 58120, Mexico Area
(4)
(e-mail: rv486@msn.com).
C. R. Fuerte-Esquivel is with University of Michoacán, Michoacán 58060,
México. Area
(5)
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPWRD.2004.839738

0885-8977/$20.00 © 2005 IEEE

1210 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 20, NO. 2, APRIL 2005

(2)

(3)

TABLE III
THD FOR N = 5; k = 1

CPWM technique are compared with the values obtained with

HEPWM and EAPWM techniques [1]. Tables I–III show the
firing angles, harmonic amplitudes, and total harmonic distor-
tion (THD) of the waveform, respectively, obtained by each
technique.

IV. CONCLUSION

Fig. 2. Centroid of the nth sinusoidal area.

The THD obtained with the CPWM technique is lower than
the THD computed with the EAPWM technique, but it is greater
in 4% than the THD obtained with the HEPWM technique,
TABLE I
FIRING ANGLES FOR N = 5; k = 1 as shown in Table III. The low-order harmonics obtained by
the CPWM technique are not completely eliminated, but their
values are under or near 5% of the fundamental voltage output,
as shown in Table II. Hence, its performance is very similar to
the HEPWM technique and better than the EAPWM technique.
Furthermore, the switching angles’ computation time is faster
with the CPWM technique because it does not require solving
a set of nonlinear equations or precalculated tables (i.e., the
switching angles are computed directly by a closed-form equa-
TABLE II tion based on the centroid method). In addition, if it is necessary
HARMONIC AMPLITUDES FOR N = 5; k = 1 to handle different amplitudes of the inverter output voltage am-
plitude for the same number of pulses, the CPWM technique
obtains the commutation angles directly by only modifying the
value without calculating the equilibrium point again. The
CPWM technique is applicable to online control, since it does
not need to store great lookup tables nor use complex interpola-
tion algorithms.

where is the magnitude factor, which handles the fundamental
component amplitude of the signal inverter output modifying
proportionally, the width of the generated pulse, without moving
the equilibrium point .
III. STUDY CASE
The harmonics components of the inverter output are com-
puted by the proposed methodology for five pulses in a half
cycle and . The computed results by the
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