A Novel Nine-Level Inverter Employing One Voltage Source and Reduced Components as High-Frequency AC Power Source

• Published in: IEEE transactions on power electronics Vol. 32; no. 4; pp. 2939 - 2947
• Main Authors: Liu, Junfeng, Wu, Jialei, Zeng, Jun, Guo, Huafang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.04.2017; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Capacitors; Circuits; Computer simulation; Conversion; Electric converters; Electric potential; Electric power distribution; Electric power supplies; Electronic devices; Feasibility studies; Harmonic distortion; Inverters; Modulation; Nine-level inverter; one voltage source; Performance assessment; Power distribution; self-voltage balancing; Stress; Switches; Topology; two capacitors
• ISSN: 0885-8993; 1941-0107
• DOI: 10.1109/TPEL.2016.2582206

Increasing demands for power supplies have contributed to the population of high-frequency ac (HFAC) power distribution system (PDS), and in order to increase the power capacity, multilevel inverters (MLIs) frequently serving as the high-frequency (HF) source-stage have obtained a prominent development. Existing MLIs commonly use more than one voltage source or a great number of power devices to enlarge the level numbers, and HF modulation (HFM) methods are usually adopted to decrease the total harmonic distortion (THD). All of these have increased the complexity and decreased the efficiency for the conversion from dc to HF ac. In this paper, a nine-level inverter employing only one input source and fewer components is proposed for HFAC PDS. It makes full use of the conversion of series and parallel connections of one voltage source and two capacitors to realize nine output levels, thus lower THD can be obtained without HFM methods. The voltage stress on power devices is relatively relieved, which has broadened its range of applications as well. Moreover, the proposed nine-level inverter is equipped with the inherent self-voltage balancing ability, thus the modulation algorithm gets simplified. The circuit structure, modulation method, capacitor calculation, loss analysis, and performance comparisons are presented in this paper, and all the superior performances of the proposed nine-level inverter are verified by simulation and experimental prototypes with rated output power of 200 W. The accordance of theoretical analysis, simulation, and experimental results confirms the feasibility of proposed nine-level inverter.