Asymmetric Cascaded Multilevel Inverter with Capacitor-based Half-bridge Cells and Reduced Number of Components

This study proposes an asymmetric multilevel inverter (MI) entitled as the Asymmetric Cascaded Half-bridge MI (ACHB-MI). The proposed ACHB-MI is structured by cascading multiple capacitor-based half-bridge cells with nonequal dc sources and one ancillary cell. A half-bridge cell can only develop a specific voltage level with either a negative or positive polarity, and thus the cascaded half bridge cells can generate certain odd or even voltage levels. Consequently, an ancillary cell is added to generate the entire needed negative, positive and zero voltage levels. The proposed ACHB-MI reduces the total number of switches, the conduction power loss, and the cost. The performance and feasibility of the proposed ACHB-MI are approved through simulation and experimental verification.