A New Five-Level Voltage Source Inverter: Modulation and Control

In this article, a new five-level voltage source inverter is proposed for high-power applications. The proposed inverter is competitive in performance, component count, and control complexity compared with the conventional multilevel inverters. Also, the proposed inverter has a simple structure as it does not have any dc-link neutral points, unlike hybrid converters. Furthermore, the proposed topology can be connected in a back-to-back due to the presence of a common dc-link. Also, there is no need of isolated dc source and a complex phase-shifting transformer. In addition, a simple voltage balancing approach based on a level-shifted carrier pulsewidth modulation scheme is proposed to control the flying capacitor voltages. The proposed approach will make use of the redundancy switching states to balance the flying capacitor voltages in the proposed inverter. The steady-state and transient performance of the proposed five-level voltage source inverter and voltage balancing approach is validated through MATLAB simulation studies at different power factors and modulation indices. The simulation studies are further evaluated experimentally by a scaled-down laboratory prototype. Furthermore, the feasibility of the proposed topology is analyzed under the performance indices of voltage and current harmonic distortion, flying capacitor voltage ripples, converter power losses, and converter efficiency.