Novel cell based on reduced single-phase active front end for multicell converters

Multilevel converters are a very interesting alternative for medium and high power drives. One of the more flexible topologies of this type is the multicell converter. This paper presents a new regenerative cell suitable for cascaded multilevel inverters. The cell uses a reduced single-phase active rectifier at the input and an H-bridge inverter at the output side. The cell has a reduced switch count and presents a very good performance, controlling effectively the waveform of the input current and of the output voltage. The results presented in this paper confirm that this medium voltage inverter effectively eliminates low frequency input current harmonics at primary side of the transformer and operates without problem in regenerative mode