Novel three-phase multilevel voltage source inverter with reduced no. of switches

Recently, great attention has been addressed for multilevel inverters, as they exhibit low total harmonic distortion in the output voltage and low electromagnetic interference. In this paper a new configuration of three-phase multilevel voltage source inverter is presented. This structure consists of series-connected sub-multilevel inverters blocks. The number of utilized switches, insulated gate driver circuits, voltage standing on switches, installation area and cost are considerably reduced compared to the conventional topologies. With the selected inverter DC sources, high-frequency pulse-width modulation control methods can be effectively applied without loss of modularity. Low-frequency and sinusoidal PWM techniques were successfully applied. Hence, high flexibility in the modulation of the proposed inverter is demonstrated.