A Three-Phase Five-Level Boost Inverter

Abstract

Multilevel inverters are a popular solution for photovoltaic power plants, wind farms and other renewable energy generation. This paper presents a floating capacitor self-balancing three-phase five-level boost (5L-Boost) inverter. A notable feature of the inverter is that its maximum voltage gain is twice as that of traditional three-phase inverters such as neutral point clamp (NPC), floating capacitor (FC), cascaded H-bridge (CHB) and active NPC (ANPC). More importantly, the inverter can realize self-starting and self-balancing of FC, and self-balancing of DC capacitors, so complex FC voltage balancing strategies and DC capacitor voltage control methods are no longer required. Taking one phase as an example, the effectiveness of the topology is verified through simulation and experiment.