Comparison of Five-level and Seven-level Multi-Level Inverters Designed with Fewer Switches and less Voltage Stress

Multi-level inverters used for single-phase applications requires more quantity of power switches as the inverter voltage level at the output increases. The increase in number of devices affects inverter size, increases the cost, increases the complication of generating firing pulses, and raises the voltage stress across the devices. Reduced switch count multi-level inverter is the solution to minimize these issues. Hence in this paper, performance analysis of multi-level inverters with reduced semiconductor switch counts for five-level and seven-level output is discussed. While the conventional five-level and seven-level inverter models respectively require eight and twelve switches, the reduced switch count five-level and seven-level inverters uses 6 and 5 switches. The performance of both conventional and inverters with fewer switches are analyzed through simulation by using MATLAB/SIMULINK.