A New Multilevel Inverter With Reduced Component Count for a Standalone Solar Energy Conversion System

A multilevel inverter (MLI) is an ingenious technology in generating a sinusoidal output voltage for AC applications. Higher output voltage levels improve the waveform quality but render increased size and power loss due to higher component count. In this paper, a new MLI topology with reduced device count is proposed which generates different numbers of output voltage levels according to the source management without altering the proposed circuit configuration. This MLI consists of ten semiconductor switches and two isolated DC sources. The asymmetric source management of 1:3 generates seventeen levels in the output voltage waveform and nine levels with symmetric (1:1) and thirteen levels with binary-asymmetric (1:2) source selection. This work projects the application of the proposed 17-level MLI in a constant power standalone solar energy conversion system. Minimum switching transitions and fundamental-voltage-reference-based switching angle calculation are adopted to achieve sinusoidal output voltage with least switching loss. As compared with the established 17-level MLI topologies, the proposed configuration has a lower component count level (CCL), lesser total blocking voltage (TBV), lesser THD, low switching frequency, no electromagnetic interference, more efficient, and cost-effective. This manuscript incorporates the design, simulation, and experimental validation of the proposed system for different PV input and load conditions.