Cascaded Multilevel Inverter With Series Connection of Novel H-Bridge Basic Units

A new single-phase cascaded multilevel inverter based on novel H-bridge units is proposed. In order togenerate all voltage levels (even & odd) at the output, nine different algorithm-s are proposed to determine the magnitudes of dc voltage sources. Then, the proposed algorithms are compared to investigate their advantages and disadvantages. This topology is able to increase the num-ber of output voltage levels by using a lower number of power electronic devices such as switches, po-wer diodes, driver circuits, and dc voltage sources, that lead to reduction in installation space and cost of the inverter. In addition, in the proposed cascaded multi-level inverter, not only the number of requi-red power electronic devices is reduced, but also the amount of the blocked voltage by switches, and t-he number of different voltage amplitudes of the used sources is decreased. The operation and performances of the propose-d topology with its presented algorithms in generating all voltage levels have been verified by using the experimental results of a 49-level single-phase inverter.