ABSTRACT Nowadays reduced switch multilevel inverter (MLI) is achieving more attention because of the lower number of switches, lesser complexity, reduced cost and higher efficiency. In the paper, a novel nine‐level common‐ground switched capacitor (9L‐CG‐SC) MLI having a reduced number of switches has been proposed. The proposed inverter has one DC source, nine switches (eight unidirectional and only one bidirectional), one diode and three SCs which provide twice the voltage boosting capability. The proposed inverter has been compared with the other recently published state of art 9L‐SC‐MLI topologies having the same voltage boosting capabilities. The comparison shows that the proposed topology provides the lowest cost function with the least number of switches as compared to other topologies. The proposed 9L‐CG‐SC‐MLI has been developed under the MATLAB/Simulink environment. Then a metaheuristic optimisation algorithm named Special Relativity Search (SRS) has been implemented in the proposed inverter for selective harmonics elimination (SHE). The SRS based SHE technique determines the optimal values of the switching angles for the proposed 9L‐CG‐SC‐MLI to achieve lower total harmonic distortion at the voltage output. The results show that SRS based SHE can eliminate the undesired fifth, seventh and ninth order harmonics from the output of 9L‐CG‐SC‐MLI completely. These obtained results are then validated using a hardware setup in the laboratory.
Ansari et al. (Thu,) studied this question.