A New Multilevel Inverter with Alleviated Number of Switches for Renewable Energy Applications

This paper presents a new single phase multilevel inverter (MLI) which can be used in low power renewable energy applications. The proposed inverter is designed by considering three asymmetrical voltage sources which minimizes the number of semiconductor devices and consequently increases the overall system efficiency while reducing the implementation cost. As the proposed topology is independent on the energy storage elements, so it does not suffer from the balanced charging problem and capacitor ripple losses. Although, an H-bridge cell is connected with the inverter to generate a negative half cycle of the output voltage, the total value of the standing voltage is still in an acceptable range due to the utilization of least number of semiconductor devices. At last, the proposed inverter performance is evaluated on a single-phase stand-alone system with different loads. In order to show the superiority of the proposed topology, the performance is also compared with the existing topologies.