Experimental verification of a hybrid multilevel inverter with voltage-boosting ability

Abstract

A new nine-level natural-balanced boost hybrid multilevel inverter (BH-MLI) is proposed in this paper. Each phase of the proposed BH-MLI is designed with only 11 semiconductor switches and two electrolytic capacitors. Here, the capacitor voltages are balanced by utilizing the series-parallel and natural balancing techniques effectively. Furthermore, the proposed circuit eradicates the multiple DC sources by introducing a single DC link for single- and three-phase applications. The proposed topology can be easily extendible to obtain higher level output voltage waveform due to its modular-switched capacitor cells (SCCs). Besides, the higher voltage level generation does not pose high-voltage stress on any of the topology components, as the blocking voltage of all devices within the source voltage magnitude. Further, a quantitative comparison is conducted among the state-of-art switched-capacitor multilevel inverter (SC-MLIs) to highlight the superiority of the proposed configuration. Finally, the performance of the proposed BH-MLI is experimentally validated with phase disposition-pulse width modulation (PD-PWM) and round control method at different modulation indices, load conditions. 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.