A Generalized Bidirectional Structure for Multi-Level Inverter with Low Number of Power Electronic Devices

Abstract

Multi-level inverters (MLIs) have made great strides in the use of renewable and industrial energy compared to conventional two-level inverters in terms of output voltage quality, filters and high efficiency requirements. This paper describes a new topology for single-phase multi-level invereter. This topology is presented with the aim of reducing the number of isolated voltage sources, switches and drivers that are able to modularly increase the number of output levels. The proposed structure has been improved to achieve a higher number of output voltage levels relative to the number of switches, drivers and DC voltage source. To confirm the superiority of the proposed structure, a detailed comparison has been performed with other multi-level inverter topologies. In this paper, the Nearest Level Modulation (NLM) is used to generate the output voltage and is simulated in Matlab/Simulink environment. The performance of the designed structure is comprehensively evaluated in symmetric and asymmetric topologies.

Keywords

• multilevel inverter
• bidirectional structure
• switch count reduction
• diode containing structure