Design and development of a novel 19-level inverter using an effective fundamental switching strategy

Abstract

This paper presents a single-phase 19-level inverter with fewer switching components, leading to reducing the cost and enhancing reliability for renewable applications. The anticipated multilevel inverter has two bridges that generate quasi-square and seven-level uneven waveforms with equal magnitude steps. Two voltage waveforms are cascaded at secondary side of transformers to create the 19-level output voltage waveform. Furthermore, to find the appropriate switching instants of the proposed configuration, a new fundamental switching method called the fundamental sine quantized switching technique is presented. In fact, it has the capacity to provide the N number of switching instants with less computational efforts, and attain optimized total harmonic distortion in the output voltage. Finally, performance of the proposed topology is validated with simulations and a hardware setup. © 2013 IEEE.