A Single Phase Seven-level MLI with Reduced Number of Switches Employing a PV Fed SIMO DC-DC Converter

In this article, a high step up single input- multi output (SIMO) dc-dc converter fed multilevel inverter (MLI) with fewer components for PV systems is presented. The SIMO converter provides two different output voltages required for the 7-level MLI with lesser number of components and enables improved energy extraction from the PV system. The presented MLI structure produces the 7-level waveform at the output using six switches and two diodes which are less compared to traditional and recently proposed MLI topologies. A detailed analysis of both the DC-DC converter and proposed MLI topology is included in this paper. A comparison between the proposed MLI topology and other topologies is presented to show the merits of the proposed system. Simulation studies are carried out in the matlab/Simulink software and appropriate results are presented.