Design and Analysis of a New Multilevel Inverter with Reduced Number of Switching Devices

In this paper, a modular multilevel inverter is proposed. The suggested structure is composed of two main units: H-bridge and Basic unit. A presented basic unit produces only positive and zero voltage levels. The second part is an H-bridge, which is exploited to generate symmetric polarity on the AC side. The proposed topology is extended easily by cascading and adding more basic units. Therefore, two different DC voltage source determination methods are suggested. To show the merits and superiorities of the suggested inverter, a comprehensive comparison is made in the viewpoint of the number of elements and total standing voltages. Furthermore, the nearest level control is chosen to produce the desired gate commands. Moreover, the operation and availability of the presented MLI are investigated by a simulation in MATLAB/Simulink.