A Novel 5L Boosting Inverter With Reduced Spike Current

This article introduces a novel five-level inverter with a single DC source that uses only seven power switches and one capacitor. The proposed inverter provides soft charging of the capacitor as it includes a charging inductor, which helps in reducing or eliminating large inrush or spike currents in the charging path. The suggested topology inverter has several advantages over the existing five-level inverters. These include the significant reduction of inrush current and the use of fewer components. Additionally, the voltage stress is shared uniformly throughout power switches, leading to improved performance. These benefits are realised by the suggested inverter through the use of an appropriate switching mechanism. To prove the effectiveness of the suggested inverter, the article details the circuit design process, theoretical loss computation, and feature comparison with inverters using similar topologies. As a means of demonstrating the efficacy of the suggested inverter, an experimental prototype and its results have been thoroughly discussed.