As in this era, the conversion of DC power to AC power is a necessity in the power system in order to make useful of renewable energy. The most commonly used switching mechanism is known as inverter or multilevel inverter. However, this switching may cause harmonics. Harmonics usually occur in a power system due to distortion, which can cause a lot of unwanted problems. It could appear either in voltage or in current waveforms. Minimization of Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) is necessary in order to maintain a good power system. This paper introduces selective harmonic elimination pulse width modulation for five-phase cascaded multilevel inverter. The proposed switching technique for five-phase cascaded multilevel inverter used in this research is non-notch and notch switching technique. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm was used as an optimization technique to find switching angles for non-notch and notch switching techniques. In addition, the simulation of a seven-level five-phase cascaded multilevel inverter for both switching operations is carried out in the PSIM environment. The results show that the non-notch switching was able to eliminate lower order harmonics up to the 7th harmonic. In addition, the notch switching technique managed to eliminate lower order harmonics up to the 21st harmonic for 3/3/3 switching distribution.
