A Single-Phase Multilevel Inverter Using Switched Series/Parallel DC Voltage Sources

A novel multilevel inverter with a small number of switching devices is proposed. It consists of an H-bridge and an inverter which outputs multilevel voltage by switching the dc voltage sources in series and in parallel. The proposed inverter can output more numbers of voltage levels in the same number of switching devices by using this conversion. The number of gate driving circuits is reduced, which leads to the reduction of the size and power consumption in the driving circuits. The total harmonic of the output waveform is also reduced. The proposed inverter is driven by the hybrid modulation method. In this paper, the circuit configuration, theoretical operation, Fourier analysis, simulation results with MATLAB/SIMULINK, and experimental results are shown. The experimental results accorded with the simulation results.