Review of Multilevel Converters/Inverters

Multilevel converters and inverters have become the enabling power conversion technology for high voltage high power applications in industries, power systems and energy conversions. Although the neutral-point clamped inverter was invented in 1979, the multilevel concept was not formally established until the early 1990s when diode-clamped multilevel inverter and the cascade multilevel inverter were proposed and entirely study. All these multilevel inverters have their voltage balancing problems and each of them has its own distinguished topology. A generalized multilevel inverter topology was proposed to overcome the voltage balancing problems and to reveal the commonality and connection of all multilevel converters/inverters structures. Recently, many novel topologies are proposed by deriving from generalized structure, such as zigzag multilevel inverter, modular multilevel converter (M2LC), marx multilevel inverter and etc. This paper presents a survey on novel topologies, controls and applications of multilevel converters and inverters