Voltage

Engineering

Network topology

H bridge

Half bridge

Computer science

Computer network

Capacitor

Boosting (machine learning)

Switched capacitor

Inverter

Electronic engineering

Artificial intelligence

Decoupling capacitor

Topology (electrical circuits)

Machine learning

Electrical engineering

IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics

Cascaded multilevel inverter (CMI) is one of the most popular multilevel inverter topologies. This topology is synthesized with some series-connected identical H-bridge cells. CMI requires several isolated dc sources which brings about some difficulties when dealing with this type of inverter. This paper addresses the problem by proposing a switched-capacitor (SC)-based CMI. The proposed topology, which is referred to as switched-capacitor single-source CMI (SCSS-CMI), makes use of some capacitors instead of the dc sources. Hence, it requires only one dc source to charge the employed capacitors. Usually, the capacitor charging process in a SC cell is companied by some current spikes which extremely harm the charging switch and the capacitor. The capacitors in SCSS-CMI are charged through a simple auxiliary circuit which eradicates the mentioned current spikes and provides zero-current switching condition for the charging switch. A computer-aid simulated model along with a laboratory-built prototype is adopted to assess the performances of SCSS-CMI, under different conditions.

Switched-Capacitor-Based Single-Source Cascaded H-Bridge Multilevel Inverter Featuring Boosting Ability