A Switched-Capacitor-Based Multi-Source Multilevel Inverter for High-Frequency AC Applications

The recent trend in space, telecommunications, aircraft, computer applications, lighting, electric vehicles, and microgrids is the use of high-frequency AC (HFAC) supply. This paper proposes a multi-source multilevel inverter (MSMLI) for HFAC applications. The proposed topology employs lesser number of power switches while generating a higher number of voltage levels. Thereby reducing the requirement of large filtering. Structurally, the proposed topology is made up of a front-end dc-dc converter based on switched-capacitor (SC) and a back-end polarity generator. The voltage across SC is self balancing owing to series/parallel charging technique. Two modulation methods based on fundamental and high-frequency switching are applied for the generation of multilevel waveform. PLECS simulation software is used to validate the operation of the proposed topology. In addition, thermal analysis taking into account the variation into load power factor (PF) is carried out and the results are presented. From the results, it will be shown that the proposed topology’s operation is independent of load PF and modulation method.