A New Asymmetric Multilevel Inverter With Reduced Number of Components

This article presents a new asymmetric voltage-source multilevel inverter with a reduced number of components. It is composed of several basic units, where each one can be designed to generate multilevel voltage with positive, zero, and negative levels. The basic units are connected in a cascaded fashion to provide the advantages of higher output voltage quality. To specify the amplitude of dc voltage sources of the proposed inverter, two methods are presented. Optimal topologies of the proposed inverter based on different criterions are also presented, which are important in the design process. The superiority of the proposed inverter is verified by comparison with some recent multilevel inverters in terms of IGBTs number, number of driver circuits, the total standing voltage on switches, and the number of output voltage levels. Losses analysis is also presented to study the effect of the modulation index and output power factor on the inverter efficiency. The ability of the proposed inverter to generate high-quality multilevel output voltage is verified through simulations and experimental results.