Review of recent trends of advancements in multilevel inverter topologies with reduced power switches and control techniques

Abstract Currently, multilevel inverters (MLI) are comprehensively used to integrate renewable energy sources with the grid or high‐power applications. MLI has outstanding properties such as high‐level output voltage with tremendous power quality and negligible harmonics distortion. General MLI topologies have a more complex circuit, high overall cost and installation area. Due to a large number of power switches and isolation of control circuit, fewer power electronic switches and DC source along with its suitable control logic is the need of the hour. Therefore, a lot of research scope exists in this area. Here, some of the topologies with a fewer number of power switches are reviewed and scrutinized. An extensive analysis of the topologies, control strategy and applications are presented here, suggesting suitable multilevel inverter solutions to the known industrial application or new research.