A New Fault-Tolerant Single-Phase Hybrid Five-Level Inverter Configuration With Enhanced Output Voltage

Low reliability is a critical concern in multilevel inverters due to the necessity for more semiconductor devices and capacitors. Therefore, this paper presents a new fault-tolerant multilevel inverter (FTMLI) topology with more redundant states, which allows the inverter to handle single/multiple switch open circuit (OC) faults. In addition, this topology achieves an output voltage gain of two, which enables the usage of a reduced DC voltage source at the input side to obtain the rated output voltage. It preserves its voltage levels and rated power during normal and fault-tolerant operations with inherent capacitor voltage balancing. The performance of the inverter is verified at various switch fault cases through MATLAB/Simulink environment, and the results are found satisfactory.