An assessment of advanced DC-link based reversing voltage type multilevel inverter topologies

Abstract

In this paper, advanced DC-Link (DCL) based reversing voltage type Multilevel Inverter (MLI) topologies by compensating the difficulties in the conventional MLIs are reviewed. These topologies consist of less switching components and driver circuits when compared with conventional MLIs predominantly in higher levels. Consequently, installation area, total cost and hardware difficulties are reduced by increasing the voltage levels. The unipolar based Pulse Width Modulation Schemes (PWMS) will improve DCL inverters performance. This paper presents unipolar Multi-Reference (MR) based sine and space vector PWMS with single triangular carrier wave for generating required levels in output voltage. Comparison between UMR sine and space vector PWMS for DCL inverter topologies is presented in terms of Fundamental Output Voltage (FOV) and Total Harmonic Distortion (THD). The research tries to establish the survey analysis for single-phase 7-level DCL based reversing voltage type MLI topologies with UMR based sine and space vector PWMs. Finally, to confirm the feasibility of proposed DCL-MLIs in terms of FOV and THD the simulation results are incorporated. Further, the prototype model is developed for single-phase 7-level DCL inverter with Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based UMR sine and space vector PWMS to authenticate simulation results. The efficiency of the proposed cascaded MLI achieves the value of 99.003%.