A hybrid neutral point clamped multilevel boost inverter topology

Multilevel inverters (MLI) have been a suitable alternate to three level inverters in medium/high power applications due to reduced voltage distortion, lesser voltage stress, lower electromagnetic interference (EMI) and improved power quality. The MLI have the distinctive advantage of increased voltage level with reduced switching stress while it suffers from increased power components. In this paper, a new MLI is proposed to nurture the power component count while increasing the number of voltage levels. In this direction, a traditional dc-dc boost converter is tailored with three level neutral point clamped inverters to introduce asymmetric voltages in the dc-link bus capacitors thereby increased voltage levels in the output terminals. For simplicity, the operating modes of the proposed inverter are studied using Selective Harmonic Elimination (SHE) and the same is simulated in MATLAB platform. The pulse generation methodology acquired through Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) that used to elicit the gating signals for the proposed inverter and is validated with a laboratory prototype of 1KW. The simulation results accorded with the experimental results to facilitate the proposed inverter suitable for renewable energy applications.