11-Level Operation with Voltage-Balance Control of WE-Type Inverter Using Conventional and DE-SHE Techniques

This article presents an 11-level operation of the WE (Wee)-Type inverter. The topology employs a single DC-source, has a reduced number of components, and exhibits a boosting capability. A voltage balancing algorithm is proposed where the inverter's redundant states are employed to maintain the auxiliary DC-link voltage. It is shown that with the control algorithm, the link voltage is preserved at half the primary DC-link voltage, and the 11-level operation is possible for any load. The presented 11-level WE-type structure is also compared with recent 11-level structures and has a lowest cost factor. Two modulation strategies verify the 11-level operation of the inverter: first, a modified nearest level control (MNLC) with the usage of both zero states is developed; and, second, selective harmonic elimination (SHE) is employed, where the angles are generated using a differential evolution (DE) technique. The maximum efficiency of the inverter is 97.55 %. The performance of the inverter is validated in MATLAB/Simulink and on the hardware-in-the-loop platform.