A New Reduced Switch Multilevel Inverter for PV Applications

According to the increase of Multi-Level Inverter (MLI) applications in distributed generations, a novel single-phase grid-connected MLI topology is proposed in this paper. The proposed inverter is planned to feed the utility grid from renewable energy sources (RESs) to overcome the issue of output sinusoidal waveform in conventional MLIs by generating a multilevel waveform with too many levels, and fewer switches count. The proposed structure is fault-tolerant and modular. A detailed analysis of the proposed topology for two different 13 and 20 switches have been carried out to show its superiority over the conventional MLI topologies. The 79-level and 321-level of the proposed MLI are designed and simulated in MATLAB/SIMULINK environment. After a precise simulation, due to compliance with the IEC 61727–2004, about total harmonic distortion (THD) of output voltage and current, there is no need to use extra output filter.