Switching circuit and drive for cascaded multilevel inverter

Abstract

A reduce device count multilevel inverter or RDC-MLI can generate high levels of sinusoidal output waveforms with minimum number of switches. In this paper, switching signals and drives for RDC-MLI inverter are design and verify through software and prototype circuit. The switching signals were first design and simulate using PSIM environment. For prototype circuit, PIC16F877 microcontroller was used to generate the switching signal. TLP250 optocoupler was used to drive the level generation switches while IR2101 was used to drive the H-bridge. The simulation output waveform signals were identical to experimental prototype results. RDC-MLI inverter implemented with the designed switching signals and drives circuit, successfully produced high levels of output waveform with four asymmetry sources.