A new three phase step up multilevel inverter topology for renewable energy applications

Abstract

Inverters are used in wide area of interests including household and industries. But in many microgrid applications, industrial applications and aircraft applications, where a renewable energy sources such as photovoltaic, wind, fuel cells etc are used, the classical three level inverters cannot be used due to polluted sinusoidal output. To overcome this difficulty multilevel inverters are used. The output of multi level inverters almost follows the sinusoidal waveform. The more the number of levels, the more faithful is the sinusoidal wave. This paper proposes a new three phase step up multilevel inverter. MATLAB simulation of a typical nine level inverter is done and result analysis is presented. Only a single voltage source is used as input. The number of output levels is determined by the number of switched capacitor cells. Also, different levels can be achieved by cascading repeated blocks. Problems of numerous active switches and thereby the need of complex gating circuitry are avoided in this topology.