Other Multilevel Voltage Source Inverters

This chapter focuses on the analysis of advanced inverter topologies, including multilevel active neutral‐point clamped (ANPC), neutral‐point piloted (NPP), nested neutral‐point clamped (NNPC), and modular multilevel converters (MMCs) inverters. It explains the operating principle of these inverters, introduces their modulation schemes, and elaborates the DC capacitor voltage balancing control. Both carrier‐based sinusoidal pulse‐width‐modulated (PWM) and space vector modulation (SVM) schemes can be used for the ANPC inverter, but the gate signals generated by these modulation schemes should be modified to redistribute the power losses of the switches to achieve even junction temperature distribution for the switches in the inverter. The flying‐capacitor (FC) inverter may have limited practical applications due to the large number of flying capacitors that need isolated pre‐charging circuits and complex voltage balancing control, but this topology can be used to derive other multilevel topologies.