New improved three‐phase hybrid multilevel inverter with reduced number of components

A new three‐phase hybrid multilevel inverter configuration is proposed. The proposed inverter is modular and consists of three single‐phase H‐bridge inverters, one three‐phase H‐bridge inverter and auxiliary modules for increasing the number of output voltage levels. The performance of the proposed inverter has been compared with some of the commonly used inverters within the literature in terms of the number of components, blocking voltage and overall losses. The proposed multilevel inverter has lower number of insulated‐gate bipolar transistors and gate drivers and subsequently requires a relatively simple control strategy for generating the desired output voltage. Finally, the performance of the proposed inverter has been validated via a laboratory‐scale prototype along with numerical simulation.