A Novel 9-Level Multilevel Inverter for Water Pumping System

In agricultural and residential applications where the grid power is unavailable, water pumping devices assisted by photovoltaic (PV) array are growing more popularity. The performance of a proposed multilevel inverter (MLI) fed induction motor water pumping system (WPS) is investigated in this research. <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathbf{V}/f$</tex> method is adopted for speed control of the induction motor in the single-stage WPS system. The proposed multilevel inverter with phase opposition disposition sinusoidal pulse width modulation (POD-SPWM) technique is employed to produce the reference voltage for the WPS system. Simulations are carried for the proposed system in MATLAB/Simulink platform. The system is tested under different test case conditions and are tabulated. The proposed MLI for water pumping is easy to use, needs less devices compared to traditional ones and produces optimal voltage and current waveforms with lower harmonics, which minimizes the need of filters.