Grid Interfacing Three Phase Five-Level Inverter with Less Number of Switching Elements

Abstract

Induction motors are widely used in industries, because they are rugged, reliable and economical and hence they are called as work horse power of industry. Induction motor drives requires suitable converters to get the required speed and torque without or negligible ripples. Multilevel inverters can do this job. But the conventional MLIs such as Diode Clamped MLIs  requires extra diodes in conjunction with the active switches, Flying capacitor MLIs requires extra Capacitors and control also difficult if the levels increases and the Cascaded H-bridge MLIs requires separate dc sources which limits its use. This paper proposes a new type of multi level Inverter employing PWM technique which converts the dc into ac using less number of switches when compared to conventional multilevel Inverters. Finally the induction motor using proposed inverter is simulated using Matlab/Simulink environment and the corresponding results are presented in this paper.