A New Integrated Multilevel Inverter Topology for Renewable Energy Transformation

In this paper, an integrated and highly cost efficient single-phase module based cascaded multilevel inverter (MBCMI) topology is proposed, which can generate a large number of output voltage levels equipping reduced number of circuit components. The structure of the proposed MBCMI is designed with reduced number of components and due to that, it becomes significantly cost efficient, compact in size, and lighter in weight. The balanced DC sources required for this topology are prepared using high frequency magnetic link to ensure modularity as well as reliability. Moreover, the total standing voltage (TSV) of the proposed MBCMI is minimized to a very satisfactory level as it does not contain any end side H-bridge unit for the generation of negative voltage levels. A multi-carrier based level shifted pulse width modulation (LSPWM) scheme is used to generate gate driving signals, which mitigates harmonic components from the output load current. In this work, the operating principle of the proposed MBMLI is explained with the help of a fifteen level (15L) single phase unit. The performance of the proposed MBCMI is evaluated on a MATLAB/Simulink platform under different loading conditions. In order to show the superiority of the proposed inverter, a comparison result with some existing topologies is also presented in this paper. Comparative results prove that the proposed MBCMI topology requires fewer numbers of components.