Multilevel Converters for Industrial Applications

chapter 5

Cascade Asymmetric Multilevel Converter

5.1  Introduction

Chapters 2, 3, 4 have shown that the diode-clamped and flying capacitor multilevel converters have some limitations to increase the number of voltage levels. The number of components increases exponentially with the number of levels. Thus, the complexity, volume, stored energy, and consequently, their cost greatly increase [1]. So, a new trend in the development of multilevel converters is to improve the ratio between the number of voltage levels at the output and the number of states of the converter. The asymmetric topologies generally satisfy this objective. The well-known cascaded cell multilevel converter satisfies this goal, but at the expense of using isolated power sources ...