A Novel Three-Phase 13-Level Cascaded Hybrid-Module Based Multilevel Inverter with Level-Shifted PWM

Cascaded H-bridge (CHB) multilevel inverters (MLIs) find solutions for low voltage stress across the power switches but at the cost of large number of components which makes the system more complex. Complexity increases with the increment of output voltage levels. This paper proposes a novel 13-Level three-phase inverter topology with reduced switch counts. It consists of two tripler units, two full H-bridge inverters, and one conventional three-phase two-level inverter (CTTI) (180 degree mode). Each tripler unit consists of four switches, two diodes, and two capacitors. Capacitors voltage are self-balanced and voltage-ripples across the capacitors are also reduced as the charging and discharging of the capacitors are controlled by level-shifted carriers PWM (LSCs-PWM) algorithm. The proposed topology is simulated in MATLAB/SIMULINK environment to validate its operation. The simulated results show that the proposed inverter topology has the advantage of boosted voltage, low THD, and self-balanced capacitors voltages.