A Self-Balancing Five-Level Boosting Inverter With Reduced Components

Two-stage boosting multilevel inverters (MLIs) which are highly suitable for photovoltaic power plants are known to suffer because of the high voltage stress on the switches of second stage. One of the ways to confront this issue is through eliminating of the front-end booster. However, this leads to increased structural and control complexity of the resulting integrated boosting capability MLI. This letter presents a single-stage boosting MLI requiring lesser number of switches, diodes and capacitors for renewable power generation applications. It requires nine switches and only one capacitor for five-level voltage generation. The topology has inherent selfbalancing capability, thereby does not need additional balancing circuitry. All the switches of proposed topology withstand an voltage of value equal to the input DC source only and thus exhibits an uniform blocking voltage. A less complicated logicform- equations based gating pulse generation scheme is designed for enabling the proposed MLI to maintain its capacitor voltage. Further, a comparative study with stateof-the-art topologies is carried out to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed topology. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed topology is validated through experimental tests and the corresponding results are elucidated.