A novel switched-capacitor multilevel inverter topology for energy storage and smart grid applications

Abstract

The recent advancement in the application of the internet of things in the smart grid has led to an industrial revolution in the power industry. The Industry 4.0 revolution has already set in, allowing computers to interact for an efficient and intelligent approach in solving smart grid issues. multilevel inverters (MLIs) are an integral part of the smart grid system for integrating the distributed generation sources and storage energy systems into the smart grid. It attracted attention in industrial applications as they can handle high power and high voltage with an inherent feature of superior output voltage waveform quality. Moreover, its variant, the switched-capacitor MLI (SCMLI), has the added benefit of lesser DC supply requirement. In this paper, a switched-capacitor multilevel inverter topology has been proposed, which can operate in symmetric and asymmetric mode. The proposed SCMLI generate thirteen and thirty-one level output voltages for symmetric and asymmetric selection of DC voltage sources, respectively. The proposed SCMLI has a smaller number of switching devices for a given output voltage level as compared to other recently proposed topologies. A thorough comparison is presented with the recently proposed topologies on several parameters, including cost function. To validate the proposed topology, symmetric and asymmetric cases were simulated using Mthlab® 2018a and the results were verified using an experimental hardware setup.