A Novel Asymmetric Multilevel Inverter with Phase Disposed Switching Technique for Grid Integration of Solar Photovoltaic Systems

Multilevel inverter suffers from low power conversion efficiency because of the large number of switching devices. Asymmetric multilevel inverter having the properties of a lower number of devices for generating the same output as multilevel inverter with lower total harmonic distortions (THDs) greatly contributes to the solution of low power conversion efficiency of the multilevel inverter. This paper not only proposes a novel asymmetric multilevel inverter but also illustrates the phase disposed switching technique for controlling the inverter. The main feature of the proposed topology is that it uses 86% switching devices for generating single phase seven-level output, which saves 87% switching devices compared to traditional cascaded H-bridge inverter. This proposed topology is comparable with the existing asymmetric topologies on the basis of THDs, cost, weight, and power losses. From the analysis, it is seen that, the proposed topology saves 23.57% of device cost and 23.89% of system weight as compared with that of the existing topologies. Again, THD decreases around 2.43% as evaluate to asymmetric-l and around 4.37% as contrast to asymmetric-2. The proposed inverter topology and switching technique are validated in MATLAB/Simulink environment.