A novel switched capacitor-based multilevel inverter structure for renewable energy conversion system

Abstract

Switched capacitor multilevel inverters (SCMLIs) are one of the popular solutions to mitigate the different limitations of conventional multilevel inverters (MLIs). A large number of innovative SCMLIs have been reported in literature in recent years. However, the large requirement of power switches, capacitors and large voltage stress across the switching devices are the major limitations of SCMLIs. In this paper, a novel MLI structure using switched capacitor principle has been proposed. It does not require any H-bridge circuit which reduces the switch voltage stress of the structure. It has the ability to produce 13-level output voltage with a boosting factor of 2. Further, the cascaded arrangement of the proposed structure has been realised. The structure requires a lower number of components as compared to the other SCMLIs. The operating principle, capacitor selection procedure and power losses analysis of the proposed 13-level structure have been presented. Extensive simulation and experimental studies have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed structure.