A novel single-phase five-level inverter with voltage doubling and its model predictive control method

Multilevel inverter has developed rapidly because of its advantages of high output voltage gain, extremely low harmonic content, and capacitor voltage self-balancing mechanism. Their application is limited because of the low voltage output characteristic of traditional multilevel inverters. Therefore, a multilevel inverter topology based on switched capacitor is proposed in this paper. The proposed topology uses a DC voltage source and a capacitor to generate a 5-level (5L) output voltage. The output voltage of this topology is 2 times higher than the input voltage, and it has the self-voltage balancing capability of the capacitor. Since there is no back-end H-bridge, the voltage stress of the individual switching tubes in the topology is reduced. The cost comparison with similar topologies proves the practicability of the proposed topology. In addition, the inverter is controlled by model predictive control, and simulation experiments verify the feasibility of the proposed 5L topology.