Simulation of a Seven Level Inverter and Its Comparison with a Conventional Inverter

TLDR: This paper focuses on the simulation of a seven level inverter with reduced number of switches based on transistor clamped topology consisting of a single H-bridge inverters with two IGBT switches between two diode bridges.

Abstract: Reducing the number of switches in multilevel inverter topologies is drawing incredible interest in renewable energy, motor drive and reactive power compensation applications. This paper focuses on the simulation of a seven level inverter with reduced number of switches. The seven level inverter is based on transistor clamped topology consisting of a single H-bridge inverter with two IGBT switches between two diode bridges. Triple reference single carrier modulation technique is adopted to generate gating pulses for the seven level multilevel inverter with reduced switches. Using this modulation technique, output voltage, output current and voltage stress across the switches are obtained for a modulation index of 0.9 and 1.25. The total harmonic distortion obtained for the various values of modulation index is presented. In addition, a comparison is established with a seven level cascaded H-Bridge inverter with respect to complexity of the circuit topology and total harmonic distortion. Results are obtained and observed using simulations done through MATLAB Simulink simulation tool.