Unification of Buck-boost and Flyback Converter for Driving Cascaded H-bridge Multilevel Inverter with Single Independent DC Voltage Source

It presents a unification of buck-boost and flyback converter for driving a cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter with a single independent DC voltage source. Cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter is useful to make many output voltage levels for sinusoidal waveform by combining two or more H-bridge modules. However, each H-bridge module needs an independent DC voltage source to generate multi levels in an output voltage. This topological characteristic brings a demerit of increasing the number of independent DC voltage sources when it needs to increase the number of output voltage levels. To solve this problem, we propose a converter combining a buck-boost converter with a flyback converter. The proposed converter provides independent DC voltage sources at back-end two H-bridge modules. After analyzing theoretical operation of the circuit topology, the validity of the proposed approach is verified by computer-aided simulations using PSIM and experiments.