A novel asymmetric multilevel inverter with minimum number of switches for renewable power grid applications

A multilevel inverter (MLI), which is a dc-ac converter is widely used in high voltage and high power applications, as increased number of voltage levels produce less number of harmonics. In this paper, a novel asymmetric multilevel inverter is proposed which contains less number of switches and can be employed in renewable power grid applications. The proposed topology consists of 25 output levels with only 12 switches, thereby reducing gate driver circuitry and optimizing circuit layout. Asymmetric multilevel inverter is thus more advantageous than symmetric multilevel inverter in obtaining more number of output levels. The other advantages of proposed topology are low voltage stress and reduced total harmonic distortion (THD). The THD for inverter circuit with 12 switches and 50Hz frequency is only 4.98%. The results are verified by modeling and simulating in MATLAB/ SIMULINK.