A NOVEL MULTILEVEL INVERTER TOPOLOGY FOR SYMMETRIC AND ASYMMETRIC SOURCE CONFIGURATION WITH REDUCED DEVICE COUNT

Abstract

Multilevel inverters (MLIs) are very popular in renewable energy applications due to reduced voltage stress and less total harmonics distortion. However, in conventional two-level inverters, the number of devices increases with the increase in the number of output voltage levels, and the circuit becomes bulky and expensive. An MLI topology with the reduced number of power devices especially for the higher output levels is presented in this paper. Forty-nine levels can be generated in the output voltage waveform from this circuit by using only 12 power switches. The performance of the proposed topology is evaluated through MATLAB/Simulink in detailed simulation and power loss analysis. Theoretical analysis and simulation are presented to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed MLI topology. A comparative analysis shows that the proposed MLI topology is superior to other selected existing topologies on many parameters. Finally, the simulation results the proposed MLI topology are experimentally validated using the experimental results.