A Novel Single-source 13-Level Step-up Inverter Based on Switched Capacitor Units and Multi-carrier Pulse Width Modulation Technique

This paper proposes a novel multilevel capacitor switched inverter with the capability of self-voltage balancing and step-up features. In order to obtain a 13-level voltage staircase on the load, thirteen IGBT switches, three capacitors, and only one DC bus as the input voltage source have been used within the suggested topology. Thanks to not using a back-end H-bridge unit in the proposed topology, the voltage stress across the switches is low, and the total standing voltage (TSV) is restricted to 35Vdc. The achieved voltage gain of the introduced inverter is equal to six which makes it suitable for low boost factor converters such as photovoltaic systems. The proposed topology is comparable with other structures with respect to such features as maximum blocking voltage (MBV), cost function (CF), and number of devices being used. The most important advantage of the proposed 13-level inverter is that the CF indicator is lower than other traditional configurations. The capacitors are inherently balanced without any extra complex circuits under the Multi-Carrier Pulse Width Modulation (MCPWM) switching technique. To evaluate the suggested topology, multiple simulations as well as experiments have been carried out using MATLAB software and Arduino Due-based ARM cortex-M3 core, respectively, under different modulation indices and resistive-inductive load conditions.