A Switched-Capacitor Based Five-Level Boosting Inverter With Soft Charging

Switched-capacitor (SC) based multilevel inverters (MLIs) have attained more attention owing to their ability to voltage boosting and self-balancing nature of SCs. However, these topologies suffer due to high current spikes resulting from the parallel connection of SCs with dc source. This article presents a five-level (5L) SC-based inverter to solve this problem while conserving the beneficial features of SCs. The proposed topology has a dedicated circuit comprising of one inductor and two power switches for ensuring a soft charging of the SC. The operation of the proposed topology is detailed. To attest the advantages of the proposed 5L topology, it has been thoroughly compared with other existing SC-MLIs topologies. The proposed topology is verified under both the steady and dynamic loading conditions, and the results are presented.