Analysis of a New Asymmetrical 15-Level Inverter with Distinct Modulation Techniques

Generating medium and high ac voltage outputs from the available low voltage unconventional distributed generators emerged as a new technology of power converters for high power applications. Reduced switch asymmetrical multilevel Inverter (RSAMLI) topologies with modular construction have been a major focus in current research. In addition to this, applying effective modulation techniques to the RSAMLI topology improves the quality of output voltage, efficiency, and reliability. In this paper, a new 15 level Inverter topology with a reduced number of device count has been proposed. The performance of the proposed topology is investigated with the different multi-carrier level shift SPWM techniques and with the staircase modulation technique. Objectives of the work are Switch count reduction, Total harmonics distortion (THD) reduction, and inverter output voltage harmonic spectrum improvement. The simulation results based on MATLAB are presented to validate the capabilities of the proposed topology.