• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.1610-1620
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• 2015

A major problem in conventional multilevel inverter is that an increase in power semiconductor switches causes an increase in cost and switching losses of the inverter. The multicarrier strategy adopted for the multilevel inverters has become more popular due to reduced cost, lower harmonic distortion, and higher voltage capability than the conventional switching strategy applied to inverters. Various topologies and modulation strategies have been reported for utility and drive applications. Level shifted based pulse width modulation techniques are proposed to investigate the performance of the multilevel inverter. The proposed work focuses on reducing the utilized switches so that the cost and the switching losses of the inverter do not go up and the consistent efficiency could be achieved. This paper presents the detailed analysis of these topologies. The analysis is based on the number of switches, DC sources, output level, maximum voltage, and the efficiency. As an illustration, single phase cascaded multilevel inverter topologies are simulated using MATLAB/SIMULINK and the experimental results demonstrate the viability of these inverters.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.670-684
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• 2015

The hybrid cascaded multilevel inverter (HCMLI) is a popular converter topology that is being increasingly used in high power medium voltage drives. The intricacy of the control technique for a HCMLI increases with the number of levels and due to fluctuating dc voltages. This paper presents a novel offline quadrant search based space vector modulation technique to synthesize a sinusoidal output from a dispersed pattern of voltage vectors due to different voltages in the auxiliary unit. Such an investigation has never been reported in the literature and it is being attempted for the first time. The method suggested distributes the voltage vectors for a reduced total harmonic distortion at minimal computation. In addition, the proposed algorithm determines the maximum modulation index in the linear modulation range in order to synthesize a sinusoidal output for both normal and abnormal vector patterns. It is better suited for a wide range of practical applications. It is particularly well suited for renewable source fed inverters which utilize large capacitor banks to maintain the dc link, which are prone to such slow fluctuations. The proposed quadrant search space vector modulation technique is simulated using MATLAB/SIMULINK and implemented using a Nexys-2 Spartan-3E FPGA for a developed prototype.