Recent trends and review on switched-capacitor-based single-stage boost multilevel inverter

Abstract

Multilevel inverters are very popular in renewable energy applications. These inverters produce output voltages close to sinusoidal and have lower harmonics as compared to the conventional two-level inverters as it also helps in reducing the size of the filter, thus makes the circuitry less complicated. In conventional multilevel inverter topologies, the number of devices increases with the increase of the number of output voltage levels, which in turn makes circuitry bulky and costly. Further, the boosting feature of the input voltage is also necessary for the application of multilevel inverters with renewable energy. Therefore, to reduce the count of devices, losses, and rating of devices, various switched-capacitor multilevel inverter topologies are proposed. Switched-capacitor multilevel inverter topologies (SCMLIs) can generate multiple voltage levels along with high voltage gain with a minimum number of devices. This paper gives a detailed overview of the recently introduced SCMLIs. The different SCMLIs have been categorized based on the number of levels and voltage gains. A detailed comparison has been introduced in this paper. Finally, few SCMLI topologies have been experimentally validated using the experimental results.