Generation of 13-Level Output Voltage from Single-Phase Multilevel Inverter Consisting of Cascaded Three H-Bridge Units

This paper addresses the simulation and practical implementation of single-phase multilevel inverters consisting of three H-bridge units to generate maximum 13level output voltage. The proposed system consists of a microcontroller, three separate input dc sources, isolating circuit and three cascaded H-bridge MOSFET-based voltage source inverters. The proper gate signals for MOSFETs of the three H-bridge inverters are generated by using ATmega 2560 microcontroller-based Arduino board. The complexity of generating gate drive signals for higher levels of inverter output voltage can be reduced dramatically using microcontroller. Different-level output voltage has been obtained from simulation and experimental works using three number of cascaded H-bridge inverters which require less power switching devices. The simulation and experimental results show that total harmonic distortion is reduced with increasing number of levels at the output voltage of the multilevel inverter. It is found that the experimental results are almost similar compared to the simulated results.