A Sparse Sextuplet 13-Level Switched-Capacitor DCAC Converter for Renewable Energy Integration

Low components count multilevel inverters (MLI) with boosting capabilities are being explored extensively to integrate distributed renewable energy-based sources with stand-alone loads and the grid. Switched-Capacitor multilevel inverters (SCMLI) provide such capabilities. Here, a novel sparse 13-level inverter is presented, which provides sextuple-boosted output voltage concerning the single DC source employed. It employs only fourteen switches, four capacitors and two diodes. All capacitor’s voltages maintain desired magnitudes during the corresponding inverter states. The voltage magnitude of the capacitors is developed by paralleling them with two of them across the DC-source and the rest two across the combination of the DC-source along with the capacitors. A fair comparison is performed with recent 13-level SCMLIs exhibits lowest cost factor of 2.461 among the six times boosted MLIs. The nearest level control is applied for the modulation of the presented topology. The topology is verified in various operational conditions, and its efficacy is validated in a Hardware-in-the-Loop environment.