Comparative study of multilevel topologies: NPC, multicell inverter and SMC with IGBT

This paper presents and compares several multilevel topologies used in the high voltage and high power applications. This study is focused on a multicell converter with flying capacitors, the new stacked multicell converter (SMC) and the classical neutral point clamped converter (NPC). After a recall of the properties of these converters, various aspects of the design are studied such as the energy stored in all the reactive components, the switches´ properties and the switching losses. A comparison based on losses, the energy stored and performances is made.