A new 81 level inverter with reduced number of switches

This paper proposes a trinary hybrid 81-level multilevel inverter for medium voltage applications. Benefiting from the trinary hybrid topology of the inverter, 81-level can be synthesized with the fewest components. Particularly, an 81-level inverter is an optimization in the number of levels for a given number of power transistors in power converters. The main disadvantage of the conventional topology is the large number of power supplies and semiconductors required to obtain these multistep voltage waveforms. The proposed topology significantly reduces the number of IGBTs and their gate driver circuits as the number of output voltage levels increase. The proposed inverter can synthesize high quality output voltage near to sinusoidal waves. The circuit configuration is simple and easy to control. The operational principle and key waveforms are illustrated and analyzed. To validate the proposed topology, the circuit is simulated and verified for constant frequency and constant voltage operation using MatLab Simulink.