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Multilevel Inverters

D12.5 - A Novel Driving Scheme for a Multilevel Inverter Stage Utilizing a Solid-State Multi-Terminal Bidirectional Switch

Thursday, March 26, 2026
12:00 PM - 1:45 PM CT
Location: Hemisfair Ballroom
The renewable energy revolution drives advance- ments in power conversion with the DC/AC inverter stage at the forefront. Multi-level inverters (MLIs) produce more output voltage levels than conventional two-level inverters, which allows for smaller passive filters and improved dV /dt performance, but they require complex driving strategies and an increased number of isolation points, a major bottleneck. This paper addresses these limitations by introducing an expandable MLI architecture that maintains a constant number of two isolation points regardless of output levels. This is achieved by combining the multi-terminal bidirectional switch (MTBDS), a bidirectional switch topology, with the cascaded bipolar switched cell converter (CBSC) and a novel driving scheme that replaces conventional dead-time insertion with a four-step commutation scheme. The viability of the concept was investigated with simulations and experimentally verified with a five-level 1 kW prototype that reached 95.5% efficiency at full load.