Design of Multilevel Inverter with Reduced Number of Switches

Abstract

With the development in the field of renewable energy sources (RES), there is a strong need for electrical power conversion and enhancement devices. The major RES like solar cells have output voltage in the form of dc, however, the consumer requirements are generally of ac supply. Hence, an inverter is employed to achieve the desired conversion from dc to ac supply. However, the limitation of the basic inverter is that the output voltage is limited which can be increased by using multilevel inverter which requires more number of components leading to complexity in the circuit as well as the harmonic distortion is high. In view of this, the paper proposes a multilevel (11-level) inverter with a reduced number of switches for increasing the output voltage. The proposed inverter topology is quite simple as it consists of very few devices as well as the harmonic distortion is reduced. The proposed inverter topology is tested in the MATLAB Simulink environment considering a different type of loads and from the result confirms the claim of an increase in the output voltage as well as reduced harmonic distortion.