Capacitor based asymmetric cascaded multilevel inverter with capability of charge balance control methods

In this paper an asymmetric cascaded multilevel inverter based on using a capacitor as one of its input voltage sources is proposed. This inverter is also provided to use charge balance control methods. In order to generate all voltage levels (even and odd) at the output, two different algorithms are proposed to determine the magnitude of the dc voltage sources. The main advantage of this topology is reducing the substitution of dc voltage sources and so decreasing the inverter maintenance cost. The ability of the proposed topology in generation all voltage levels by using charge balance control methods is verified by PSCAD/EMTDC simulation results on a 15-level inverter.