Certain investigations on the performance of multilevel inverters

Abstract

newlinePower Electronics Technology has gone through dynamic evolution in the last four decades. Recently, its applications are fast expanding in industrial, commercial, residential, transportation, utility, aerospace, and military environments primarily due to reduction of cost, size, and improvement of performance. It witnessed the remarkable growth in the field of Automation and Power Quality Improvement. The dominant types of Power Converters are DC-DC converters, DC-AC converters and AC-DC converters. Many improvements are made on the converters to develop new topology of converters to satisfy the requirements of a system. Among the three converters, DC-AC converters find a considerable space in industries. Nowadays, AC motors are widely used due its merits like robust structure, wide range of speed control, fast response due to low inertia, high speed with low losses etc. Adjustable speed drives plays a vital role in the key areas of the industries. The DC-AC converters provide the reliable input source to the AC motor drives. Multilevel DC to AC converters are preferred over two level inverters due to their near sinusoidal output voltage with improved harmonic spectrum. The MLI have attracted many researchers to improve the quality of the output and the performance of the AC drives gets improved. The basic topologies of multilevel inverters are cascaded H bridge structure, diode clamped or neutral point clamped structure and flying capacitor or capacitor clamped structure. Besides the multilevel inverters are near sinusoidal output, lower harmonic content, improved power quality associated with the configurations. Due to the increased number of DC levels, higher number of power electronic devices leading to increased circuit complexity, additional triggering and newline newline