A New Nine Level Inverter with Low TSV and Fewer Numbers of Components for Renewable Energy Systems

A new nine-level inverter (NLI) topology is proposed in this paper which generates nine voltage levels in the output with fewer numbers of components. This NLI is equipped with ten semiconductor switches, four capacitors and one dc voltage source. The nine voltage levels are produced through different plausible combinations of the dc source and capacitors by using the power semiconductor switches. Here, in any mode, maximum two switches conduct at a time. This reduces the conduction losses and improves the efficiency of the system. Another important feature of this topology is the low total standing voltage (TSV) of the power semiconductor switches. To reduce the switching loss of the power switches, gate signals are generated following a proposed modulation strategy. To validate the NLI, a number of simulations are performed in Simulink. A comparison of the proposed inverter with the existing topologies shows that the number of required components and de sources are significantly lower. Therefore the proposed NLI structure can be used in renewable energy systems to make the power generation process more efficient.