Performance investigation of an innovative H-bridge derived multilevel inverter topology for marine applications

Abstract

An innovative single-phase and three-phase H-bridge derived multilevel inverter topology is being proposed in this manuscript. The proposed topology makes use of relatively fewer switching devices compared to conventional Cascaded H-Bridge (CHB) multilevel inverter. In other words, the proposed inverter topology is capable of producing more number of levels in the voltage waveform with same number of switching devices. It is also established in this paper, that this proposed topology is superior in terms of requirement of lesser number of gate driving circuits and reduction in the harmonic content in the output voltage waveform. The proposed inverter topologies are driven by SPWM modulation technique. These converter topologies are not only beneficial for the power conditioning systems in the power system network but also for the other novel applications like in marine ships. In this manuscript, the performance comparisons of the proposed inverter topologies with that of conventional topology based on simulation results with MATLAB/SIMULINK have been presented.