The contribution of renewable energy, especially small-scale solar photovoltaics (PV), is increasing exponentially in the energy sector. In general, high gain DC-DC converters are used as frontend converters to increase the low voltage of PV panels; further, the DC-AC converter (multilevel inverters) is used for standalone AC loads or grid integration. To avoid the front-end converter and achieve both objectives, this paper proposes a nine-level quadruple boost inverter topology for small-scale solar PV applications. The proposed topology operates on a switched capacitor technique to boost the voltage, and has self-voltage balancing of capacitors. This paper presents the detailed operation of the proposed nine-level inverter, voltage stress calculations, loss analysis, and designing of circuit parameters. In addition, a high-gain generalized multilevel inverter (MLI) topology is also reported. Furthermore, the proposed MLI is compared with competitive inverters available in the recent literature. The proposed MLI topology has advantages such as a minimum total standing voltage and a reduced component count; it can also produce bipolar voltage inherently. The performance of the proposed MLI topology is validated through the MATLAB-based simulations and an experimental prototype. Further, the experimental results are presented by considering load variations, modulation index variations, and output frequency variations. The experimental efficiency obtained is in the range of 96.2% to 92.8% for proposed 9-level inverter.INDEX TERMS High-gain multilevel inverter, small-scale solar PV, switched capacitor, self-voltage balancing.
This paper proposes a new reduced switch count seven-level triple boost inverter based on switched capacitor technique. The proposed topology has fewer number of components and has the ability of balancing the voltage across the capacitors. The structure of the proposed topology is very simple and can be easily extended to higher number of voltage levels. The generalized structure for higher number of levels is presented. The level shifted pulse width modulation approach is used to evaluate the proposed topology. In addition, design of switched capacitors and power loss calculation of semiconductor switches are provided. This proposed inverter topology is compared with the state-of-art topologies to demonstrate its superior performance. Further, thermal modelling of the topology is done in PLECS to calculate the power losses and efficiency. Finally, this proposed 7-level topology is simulated using MATLAB/Simulink and tested on experimental prototype for the performance verification and the results are included.INDEX TERMS Switched Capacitor, multilevel inverter, DC-AC conversion, triple boost, high gain, selfvoltage balancing
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