A Novel Three-Phase Quadruple Boost Switched Capacitor Multilevel Inverter for PV Applications

Switched-capacitor based multilevel inverter (SC-ML) topologies are gaining attention due to their self-voltage balancing and boosting capabilities. It requires lesser values of DC-link voltage to achieve the desired magnitude of output voltage. Therefore, SC-ML converters significantly contribute for the application of renewable sources especially with solar photovoltaic (PV). Hence, this paper proposed a new three-phase quadruple boost multilevel inverter (QBMLI) topology with switched capacitors for PV applications. The proposed QBMLI generates nine-levels by utilizing two switched capacitors, fewer power electronic switches, and diodes. A level shifted multi-carrier pulse width modulation (PWM) is employed to enhance the quality of output voltage consisting of lower harmonics and high RMS voltages. The proposed topology initially developed in MATLAB/Simulink environment and the performance is observed by considering various indices such as modulation index and switching frequency. Furthermore, the system performance is validated in real-time using dSPACE Scalexio based Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL).