Design and Analysis of Cascaded H Bridge Nine-Level Inverter in Typhoon HIL

Abstract

As the pressure on renewable energy resources like wind and solar is growing continuously because of the tremendous rise in electrical energy consumption, inverters are playing an important part. The problem with the conventional two-level inverter is that it has high harmonic pollution and low power rating. These problems limit the use of these inverters in high power applications. Therefore, the trend towards multilevel inverters is gaining more and more interest in researchers these days. In multilevel inverters, by providing a certain switching sequence, various voltage levels can be generated in a staircase manner as close as possible to a sinusoidal waveform. In this paper, Cascaded H Bridge (CHB) based nine-level inverter is designed using Typhoon Hardware-in-loop (HIL) Simulator. The Typhoon HIL Simulator is a real-time simulator that gives real-time results. The designed multilevel inverter has been analyzed for different levels. The obtained results reveal that with the increase in number of levels, the Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) of the inverter reduces.