This paper proposes a new five-level voltage source inverter (VSI) for medium-voltage high-power applications. The proposed inverter is based on the upgrade of a four-level nested neutral-point clamped (NNPC) converter. This inverter can operate over a wide range of voltages without the need for connecting power semiconductor in series, has high quality output voltage and fewer components compared to other classic five-level topologies. The features and operation of the proposed converter are studied and a simple sinusoidal PWM scheme is developed to control and balance the flying capacitors to their desired values. The performance of the proposed converter is evaluated by simulation and experimental results.
Index Terms-Multilevel converter, DC-AC power conversion, sinusoidal pulse width modulation (SPWM).Recently, a novel four-level nested neutral point clamped (NNPC) converter has been proposed in [21]. This topology has interesting properties such as operating over a wide range of voltages (2.4-7.2kV) without the need for connecting power semiconductor in series, all switches have the same voltage stress (equal to one third of the dc voltage), and fewer components compared to other classical four-level topologies. However, this topology is a four-level topology.
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