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.