Staircase Control of Hybrid Cascaded Multi-level Inverter

A cascaded multi-level inverter consists of H-bridge modules that can generally be divided into one with the same DC bus voltage and another with different DC bus voltages. By using the same power device as a standard 7-level 3H-bridge converter, the proposed converter operates with 15-level resolution with separate DC voltage sources of voltage ratio 4:2:1. The analysis of this hybrid cascaded converter with staircase control shows that this proposal can be applied in many power conversion applications, such as flexible alternative current transmission systems, uninterruptible power supply, and electric power conversion, transmission, and storage of renewable energy sources. Simulation results are presented with the proposed 15-level cascaded H-bridge inverter for a low distortion, near-sinusoidal stepped-voltage output, and a laboratory prototype of a 15-level insulated gate bipolar transistor-based cascaded H-bridge inverter is designed and implemented on a digital signal processor. The total harmonic distortion is proved less than 5%.