Design of Multicarrier Pulse Width Modulation based Cascaded Multilevel Inverter for STATCOM using Bats Echolocation Controller

A Static Synchronous Compensator (STATCOM) is one of the Flexible AC Transmission System (FACTS) device which plays an vital role in power system network in alleviation of small and large transient disturbances and better voltage regulation. This paper proposed a self tuning Proportional-Integral (PI) controller for STATCOM which provided a voltage support at point of common coupling (PCC). Self tuning of PI controller was achieved by adapting PI controller gains with system parameters by using Bats Echolocation controller which mimics the Bats Echolocation behavior. In the proposed controller, the system voltage (parameter) at point of common coupling compared with reference voltage and then Bats Echolocation Controller updates the PI controller gains according to the variation obtained between them. This paper also proposed a Cascaded Multilevel Inverter (CMLI) instead of conventional Voltage Source Inverter (VSI) for STATCOM to obtain better voltage regulation at point of common coupling. The voltage imbalance between H-bridge cells in CMLI was rectified by prosing Multicarrier Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) techniques, The proposed controller was validated by comparing the simulation results with fixed gain PI controller and Self tuning PI controller using Neural controller and Particle Swarm Optimization.