Summary
This paper presents the design and control of single‐phase five‐level cascaded H‐bridge multilevel inverter (CHB‐MLI) as a shunt active power filter (SAPF) unit to mitigate the various power quality (PQ) problems such as reactive power burden, injection of harmonics in the supply, poor power factor, and so on. The control of CHB‐MLI has been done using the normalized least mean absolute third (NLMAT) algorithm, which overcomes the shortcoming of conventional least mean square (LMS), normalized LMS (NLMS), and least mean absolute third (LMAT) algorithm. The control algorithm is designed in MATLAB Simulink, and its scaled down prototype model is developed in the laboratory to find the fundamental active component of load current and to mitigate the aforementioned PQ problems. The proposed system is tested for single‐phase grid‐connection, and it works satisfactorily under steady state and dynamic load conditions. A dSpace1104 microcontroller is used to test the proposed algorithm and to generate firing pulses. Besides, the detailed comparison in the context of mean square error (MSE), weights convergence and intermediate error with conventional LMS, NLMS, and LMAT algorithm have also been discussed. Moreover, the harmonic distortion observed in the source current is within stipulated IEEE‐519 limits.