An eleven-level switched-capacitor inverter with boosting capability

Abstract

An 11-level switched-capacitor multilevel inverter (SCMLI) with 2.5 times boosting feature is presented in this paper. It can produce an 11-level output voltage waveform by utilizing 14 switches, 3 capacitors, 2 diodes, and 1 DC source. Only nine driver circuits are needed as the topology has three pairs of complementary switches and two bidirectional switches. It has inherent capacitor self-balancing property as the capacitors are connected across the DC voltage source during several states within a fundamental cycle to charge the capacitors to the input voltage. A detailed comparison shows the effectiveness of the proposed topology in terms of the number of switches, number of capacitors, number of sources, total standing voltage (TSV), efficiency, and boosting ability with the state-of-art recently proposed circuits. Subsequently, the performance of the proposed SCMLI is validated experimentally utilizing the nearest level control (NLC), a fundamental frequency-based switching technique.