An Innovative Symmetric and Asymmetric Topology for Multilevel Inverter Aiming to Reduce the Count of Switching Devices

In Inverters as one of the most important equipment of power systems have profoundly been developed in recent decades, and their performance has attracted researchers regarding the control and structures they enjoy. In this paper, an innovative symmetric and asymmetric topology is proposed for a multilevel inverter (MLI) in order to reduce the switch and the driver counts. Also, the number of conducting switches at each voltage level is low in this structure. These features result in lower conduction losses of switches. Besides, an accurate comparison with recently introduced multilevel inverters has been carried out to confirm the superiority of the proposed structure. For proving the suitable performance of the proposed MLI, a 21-level symmetric and 37-level asymmetric inverter containing 14 switches were designed and simulated in the MATLAB/Simulink environment. A laboratory prototype for each of these inverters was implemented as well. The experimental results finely verified the simulated results.