A modular multilevel inverter with cascaded half bridge cells

A new edition of cascaded multilevel inverter (MLI) based on secondary multilevel constituent (SMC) consisting of a series of stacked half bridge cells and an H-bridge inverter is proposed in this paper. The proposed MLI outputs higher voltage levels with the same number of switching devices. The projected MLI topology is optimized for minimal number of power switches and dc sources to synthesize the maximum level at the output voltage. In this paper, the comprehensive topology of the proposed MLI, its operating modes along with optimal structures and simulation results using fundamental switching are presented. The MLI is constructed for an output power of 1KW and is tested with a PWM method to validate the viability under wide range of operating conditions.