A new diode-clamped multilevel inverter for capacitor voltage balancing

In this paper, a new diode-clamped multilevel inverter for capacitor voltage with inserted inductors is proposed. The key is to solve the voltage unbalance of diode-clamped multilevel inverter (DCMLI), which utilizes fewer switches and adopts a simpler control strategy. In this way, the cost and volume of the DCMLI can be effectively reduced. Firstly, the new five-level inverter topology is analyzed in detail under different operation modes. Then, the proposed topology extended to (2n+1) level inverter is introduced and discussed. Finally, both simulation and experiment results are demonstrated to verify the validity of the proposed topology.