A Buck-Boost Embedded Multilevel Inverter with Double Voltage Gain

This work focuses on a Multilevel Inverter topology with an embedded voltage boosting feature. The inverter under investigation, integrates a DC/DC Buck-Boost converter to double the input voltage and the cascaded extension of the topology is presented. The power processing characteristics of the topology are evaluated to prove that the integrated DC/DC converter processes only a fraction of the total supplied active power. Also, the passive component selection of the topology is thoroughly analyzed under the DCM operation of the embedded DC/DC converter. A 1kVA prototype is implemented to study via experimental probing the performance and the efficiency of the topology.