Performance analysis and control of a novel 7-level active neutral point clamped (ANPC) topology

This paper introduces a novel 7-level active neutral-point clamped (ANPC) switched capacitor multilevel inverter (SCMLI) with voltage-boosting capabilities. The proposed converter can produce seven levels and a voltage boosting of 1.5 times with a single dc source. For boosting the voltage, two self-balanced switched capacitors and two dc link capacitors with active neutral point are used with nine switches. For controlling the output voltage, the level-shifted modulation technique and modified nearest level control technique is used. The performance of the converter is evaluated with both modulation techniques. The operation of the proposed SCMLI and the design of capacitors for the proposed circuit is discussed in detail. The proposed topology can eliminate the leakage current and has reduced voltage stress across switches which makes it suitable for solar photovoltaic applications. The proposed converter is compared with some other recently introduced converters in terms of voltage gain, the number of components used, and the voltage stress across the switches. For verifying the performance of the proposed circuit, the experimental and simulation results are presented in the paper. The experimental results closely agree with the simulation and theoretical studies. The total harmonic distortion (THD) in the output voltage and efficiency is compared with both modulation techniques.