Experimental verification of a hybrid multilevel inverter with voltage‐boosting ability

Abstract

SummaryA new nine‐level natural‐balanced boost hybrid multilevel inverter (BH‐MLI) is proposed in this paper. Each phase of the proposed BH‐MLI is designed with only 11 semiconductor switches and two electrolytic capacitors. Here, the capacitor voltages are balanced by utilizing the series‐parallel and natural balancing techniques effectively. Furthermore, the proposed circuit eradicates the multiple DC sources by introducing a single DC link for single‐ and three‐phase applications. The proposed topology can be easily extendible to obtain higher level output voltage waveform due to its modular‐switched capacitor cells (SCCs). Besides, the higher voltage level generation does not pose high‐voltage stress on any of the topology components, as the blocking voltage of all devices within the source voltage magnitude. Further, a quantitative comparison is conducted among the state‐of‐art switched‐capacitor multilevel inverter (SC‐MLIs) to highlight the superiority of the proposed configuration. Finally, the performance of the proposed BH‐MLI is experimentally validated with phase disposition‐pulse width modulation (PD‐PWM) and round control method at different modulation indices, load conditions.