New bidirectional multilevel inverter topology with staircase cascading for symmetric and asymmetric structures

Inverters, as one of the key components of electrical systems, have experienced a great evolution in the last decade, and their performance improvement is a challenge even today, leading to many researches on topologies and control schemes. This study introduces a new multilevel converter topology which is able to supply bidirectional current loads. The proposed structure has fewer power electronic devices such as power switches, driver circuits, power diodes, and DC voltage sources and, can be designed in both symmetric and asymmetric structures. In order to increase the number of output levels and the proposed basic unit development, modular expansion or cascading methods can be used. This study demonstrates that the aforementioned methods have the best results in asymmetric and symmetric structures of the proposed topology, respectively. The comparison between the proposed converter and some previous topologies shows that it has better conditions with respect to the used semiconductor count, switching and conduction losses, and total blocking voltage. The operation and performance of the proposed multi-level converter have been ascertained through simulations and verified experimentally for a single-phase symmetric thirty-one-level inverter which shows the proposed converter's ability in smooth sinusoidal output voltage generation with minimum total harmonic distortion.