A hybrid switched-capacitor multilevel inverter with self charge balancing and less number of switches

Abstract

Multilevel inverters with less number of components and power supplies play important role in most of power electronic applications. In this paper, a new switched capacitor multilevel inverter (SCMLI) is presented which can generate more output voltage levels with less number of components and one required dc power supply in contrast to some of existing topologies. This structure uses a new switched capacitor converter (SCC) which includes several capacitors that can be charged by binary asymmetrically algorithm as self-balancing. At the next, proposed SCMLI is connected to another SCMLI unit as hybrid form and then, the output voltage levels are increased with good quality using hybrid modulation technique. Several simulation results by PSCAD/EMTDC software and comparisons in different aspects such as number of required switches, capacitors, number of components that are in current path and total blocked voltage is given to confirm the effectiveness of proposed topology.