Multilevel Inverters – A Survey

Abstract

Multilevel inverter is an effective & practical solution for increasing power demand & reducing harmonics of AC waveforms. Multilevel inverter provides a desired output voltage from several levels of DC voltages as inputs to inverter. It has been found that this technique reduces the switching losses & total harmonic distortion. Advantage of the multilevel inverters is that they can generate output voltages with very low distortion and dv/dt. Also generate smaller common-mode voltage and operate with lower switching frequency compared to the conventional two level inverters. With use of lower switching frequency result in low switching losses & also reduced and the dv/dt. The voltage steps are smaller, as the number of levels increase