Hybrid Multicell Converter: Topology and Modulation

Multilevel converters have become an interesting alternative for medium- and high-voltage drives over the last decade. Among the existing alternatives, multicell structures offer advantages due to their modularity and scalability. This paper presents experimental results of a recently introduced multilevel topology. The converter is based on the mixture of the two most popular multicell topologies, namely, flying capacitor and cascaded multicell inverter. The new cell provides a high number of output levels, a low number of components, high modularity, and low losses. The results presented in this paper confirm that this new medium-voltage inverter topology is able to reach high-quality output voltages, allowing further advances in modulation techniques and other issues.