A Novel Cascaded Symmetric and Asymmetric Multilevel Inverter Topology with Minimum Number of Power Electronics Components

Multilevel inverters are a new generation of DC-AC converters at medium and high voltage and power levels. In this paper, a new single-phase cascaded multilevel inverter is presented. For this purpose, a basic cell is first presented and then by series connection of these cells, the new multilevel inverter structure is presented. The proposed new cell is only capable of generating positive voltage levels, and therefore, to produce zero and negative voltage levels, the proposed structure is constructed based on H-bridge module. A comprehensive comparison is carried out between the proposed multilevel inverter with the classical and recently introduced structures in terms of the number of switching devices, the number of drivers, the total blocking voltage of the switches as well as the loss and efficiency. The accuracy of the proposed inverter’s performance is simulated in Matlab/Simulink in symmetric and asymmetric topologies fora 21-level and 37-level output voltage respectively, and then evaluated by the laboratory prototype.