A novel three-phase multilevel voltage source converter

During the past few years, the multilevel converter has drawn tremendous interests for power electronic applications. Many topologies have been introduced, such as the diode-clamp multi-level converter, flying-capacitors multilevel converter and others. These topologies produce a staircase voltage waveform from several levels of DC or capacitor voltage source which causes a few problems such as capacitor voltage balance and numerous sums of devices. This paper proposes a novel three-phase multi-level voltage source converter with more levels and less devices and without the problem of capacitor voltage balance