A Five-level Inverter Structure with Reduced Losses

Multilevel inverters have found significant applications in the field of renewable energy sources. The increased number of power switches, however, may increase the cost, complexity, and power loss of multilevel inverters. Furthermore, the inverter’s reliability is affected by the power losses. In this paper, a new five-level inverter structure is developed to reduce the conduction losses and improve the reliability of five-level single-phase inverters. In this study, the reduction in the conduction losses is demonstrated based on theoretical analysis, followed by simulations in PSIM using real modeling of the switching devices. Calculating the time to failure of the proposed inverter and its counterpart structures also proves the improved reliability of the proposed inverter. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed structure and support the analytical and simulation results.