A New Asymmetric Cascaded Multilevel Converter Topology with Reduced Voltage Stress and Number of Switches

Abstract

This paper presents a new structure of a multilevel inverter with fewer components, which is suitable for renewable energy sources and industrial loads applications. The structure has three unequal input sources and ten switches that can generate a 15-level output voltage. Furthermore, it can be connected in cascade for increasing, even more, the number of levels and output voltage. The main feature of the proposed inverter is its very low harmonic distortion at the output voltage and current due to the control method, which is based on the nearest level control method for generating a high-quality output voltage. A typical application of this inverter is in solar cells and wind turbines. Both simulations in Matlab/Simulink and experimental results in a scaled-down prototype validate the proposed theoretical analysis.