Design and Implementation of a New Switch-Diode based Single Source Multilevel Inverter Topology

Multilevel inverters are a new generation of DC-AC converters at medium and high voltage and power levels. These converters have made great strides in the use of industrial applications compared to conventional two-level inverters due to lower harmonic distortion, filter size, EMI and dv/dt. Besides these merits, some disadvantages can be mentioned such as more power electronics devices and complex control structure. In order to resolve these disadvantages, this paper proposes a new switch-diode based multilevel inverter. This topology is presented with the aim of reducing the number of 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 MLI topologies. In this paper, the nearest level modulation technique is used to generate the output voltage and is simulated in Matlab/Simulink environment. Finally, experimental results are presented to confirm the performance of the designed topology.