A new single phase multilevel inverter topology with reduced number of switches

Multilevel inverters are preferred over conventional inverters as the quality of the output voltage improves with the number of voltage steps at the output. A new single phase cascaded multilevel inverter topology incorporating a new basic unit is proposed in this paper. Besides, seven different schemes are proposed to determine the magnitude of the dc sources. The proposed topology utilizes fewer power electronic components to generate a specific number of output voltage levels in comparison with the classical cascaded multilevel inverters resulting in compact and cost effective design. The effectiveness of the proposed inverter is adequately validated by both MATLAB based simulation and experimental results. Further, comparison of the proposed topology with the recently proposed topologies exemplifies the efficacy of the proposed topology.