A Comprehensive Review on Single-Phase 13-level Capacitor Based Multilevel Inverters for Off-Grid Applications

Step-up voltage is essential in low voltage systems consisting of solar PV, battery storage, and fuel cells. There has been a great deal of interest from researchers in switched capacitor multilevel inverters (SC-MLIs) for such applications. SC-MLIs provides the benefits of voltage boosting feature and self-voltage balancing of capacitors. This paper analyzes and reviews some of the recently proposed thirteen-level SC-MLI topologies. An analysis of various thirteen-level SC-MLI topologies has been presented in this article, and their comparison is performed based on the number of dc supply, switches, diodes, capacitors, driver circuits, boosting, total standing voltage (TSV) and cost function. This paper will help young and energetic researchers’ academicians and engineers to focus on multidimensional application of new topologies for SC-MLIs and has offered a good platform to come up with some environmental friendly solution. Future challenges and other features are also discussed for various SC-MLI topologies which will unfold the surprising characteristics of switched capacitor multilevel inverters.