A New Multilevel Inverter with Limited Switching Devices and DC Sources

This paper presents a new capacitor-based multi-level inverter (MLI) configuration for single-phase applications, to reduce the number of switches and sources. Besides reducing the number of switches, the proposed configuration minimizes the number of sources by using capacitors and dividing the voltage between the capacitors. The proposed configuration consists of an iterative cell that uses a source. The proposed configuration utilizes a variety of algorithms for voltage source amplitude to increase the number of output levels. In addition, the proposed configuration is also discussed in terms of thermal-loss analysis. In this paper, nearest level modulation (NLM) is used to synthesize output voltage levels. Comparing the proposed MLI configuration with the MLI configurations offered over the past few years reveals that the proposed MLI configuration has improved significantly in terms of reducing the number of semiconductor switches, total blocking voltage, and the number of sources. The simulation results confirm the proposed MLI configuration performance.