A comparative study on characteristics of major topologies of voltage source multilevel inverters

This paper provides a brief review on characteristics of main topologies of voltage source multilevel inverters. The selected topologies included conventional two levels, flying capacitor, neutral point clamped, three levels and seven levels cascaded H-bridge inverters. Several performances of topologies including quality of waveforms of output voltage, cost, complexity and reliability are selected as indicators for comparative study. The proposed topologies are simulated under the same load conditions in P-SIM environment.