Nine level asymmetrical switched capacitor multilevel inverter fed induction heated autoclave system for medical applications

In this work, a nine level (9-L) asymmetrical switched-capacitor multilevel inverter (ASCMLI) based induction heated (IH) autoclave for sterilization in medical applications is proposed. Due to the several benefits of multilevel inverter such as controlling of voltage magnitude and hence uniformity of heat is maintained at the load side as compared to conventional heating of autoclave. It has two common ground-connected dc voltage sources, which makes it ideal for usage in medical applications. Moreover, the development of a compact autoclave is carried out in this work that has a much reduced running time without sacrificing the quality of its sterilization. Further, the sterilization schedule for conventional and IH autoclave is presented in different temperature and pressure condition. The distributions of magnetic flux density and induced eddy current density in the multilevel inverter based IH autoclave were also exhibited. Finally, the performance of the proposed system are validated by simulation and experimental results obtained from a laboratory prototype setup.