Application of multilevel inverters for higher power purposes in industries has become more popular. This is partly because of high-quality output waveform of multilevel inverters in comparison with two-level inverters. In this paper, initially a new topology for submultilevel inverter is proposed and then series connection of the submultilevel inverters is proposed as a generalized multilevel inverter. The proposed multilevel inverter uses reduced number of switching devices. Special attention has been paid to obtain optimal structures regarding different criteria such as number of switches, standing voltage on the switches, number of dc voltage sources, etc. The proposed multilevel inverter has been analyzed in both symmetric and asymmetric conditions. The validity of the proposed multilevel inverter is verified with both computer simulations using PSCAD/EMTDC software and laboratory prototype implementation.

Multilevel inverters have attractive features which make them one of the most popular fields of investigations. They can operate in high power and high voltage conditions. Multilevel inverters generate output voltage with high quality and low harmonic contents. As the number of output voltage levels increases, the quality of the output voltage is improved leading to reduction of the filtering requirements. However, multilevel inverters have the disadvantage of increased power electronic switches. This leads to higher cost, size and complication. Some advanced topologies have been introduced to reduce the number of power electronic switches, unfortunately, most of these topologies need high voltage switches on their structure making them unsuitable for high voltage conditions. In this study, an innovative topology for multilevel inverter is proposed which reduces the number of switches considerably without using high voltage switches. The proposed topology is a general topology which can be extended for any number of voltage levels. The authors call this topology as cross‐switched multilevel inverter. The simulation results obtained in PSCAD/EMTDC as well as the experimental results verify the proposed topology.

The cascaded multilevel converters are the most favorable topologies of multilevel converters. However, they have the main disadvantage of using multiple independent dc voltage sources. This study proposes new cascaded multilevel converter topologies in which the number of independent dc voltage sources is reduced. In the proposed topologies, for a specific number of voltage levels, the number of dc voltage sources is halved. Beside the number of dc voltage sources, in one of the proposed topologies the number of switches is also reduced in comparison with that of the conventional cascaded multilevel converter. A new modified pulse‐width modulation method is presented to control the proposed topologies. Also, a method for compensating non‐ideality of the dc voltage sources is presented. Simulation results using PSCAD software as well as experimental results from a laboratory‐scale prototype are presented to verify the proposed multilevel converters.

Multilevel inverters have an important portion in power processing in power systems. These inverters have some inherent advantages such as ability to operate with high power and voltage, improved output waveform quality and flexibility which make them attractive and more popular. This study proposes a new topology based on the non-insulated dc voltage sources for multilevel inverter with reduced number of switching devices. As a result, it reduces control complexity and gate driver circuits. The proposed topology is a general topology which can be easily extended to a desired number of voltage levels. All of the desired output voltage levels (both odd and even) can be achieved using the proposed topology. The validity of the proposed multilevel inverter is verified with both computer simulation and experimental results from a 15-level laboratory prototype.

In this paper, two new topologies are proposed for three-phase dynamic voltage restorers (DVRs). These topologies are based on direct converters. The proposed topologies do not require dc-link energy storage elements. As a result, they have less volume, weight, and cost. They can also compensate long-time voltage sags and swells. The proposed DVRs can compensate several types of disturbances, such as voltage sags, swells, unbalances, harmonics, and flickers. Moreover, due to the fact that the compensation voltage for each phase is taken from all three phases, the proposed topologies can compensate one-phase outages. In the proposed topologies, three independent three-phase to single-phase direct converters are used. Each converter operates independently and, as a result, the proposed DVRs properly compensate unbalanced voltage sags and swells. The used converters can be constructed by four or six power switches. Depending on the structure of the used converters, the compensation ranges will be different. A new control method is also proposed for using direct ac/ac converters. The experimental and simulation results verify the capabilities of the proposed topologies in compensation of voltage distortions.