Modified Five-level Inverter for PV Energy system with Reduced Switch Count

Many power conversion technologies are based on multilevel inverters (MLIs). Due to their significant features of power conversion and regulation, they have been such a good choice to be utilized in renewable energy sources (RESs) integration, and grid-connected energy systems. The current attention on MLIs is mainly concerned to provide new methods or constructions by reducing the number of power switch counts and DC supplies to achieve efficient power and fault tolerance. Hence, this work is focused on the development of a modified 5-level CHB inverter with fewer switches (6 switches) and its combination with 2 PV arrays sources to achieve a 5-level voltage waveform with low harmonic distortion (HD). The modes of operation of the circuit configuration for the suggested inverter were also presented. The proposed configuration in this study achieved better output waveform quality with significant reduction in device counts and HD compared to the general structure of cascaded H-bridge MLI. Matlab/Simulink was used to simulate the suggested system. As a result, the system proved its validity to offer 849.7 V output with 97.6 % efficiency, and significant reduction of the total harmonics distortion to 1.96 %.