Experimental validation of a cascaded multilevel inverter with single excited DC source

In this paper, Pulse width modulation techniques for multi-level inverter are compared, evaluating their performance for various converter parameters. The study has been applied for a seven-level cascaded H-bridge multi-level inverter with a single dc source employing single phase transformer. There are several techniques for modulation of multilevel converters. But their performance is not similar under various inverter topologies and from different applications prospective. Moreover, they differ from each other by their ease of real time implementation. Therefore, an optimization has to be made considering all the above mentioned features. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed configuration with level shifted PWM, phase shifted PWM and space vector PWM.