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Cascaded multilevel inverter (CMI) is one of the most popular multilevel inverter topologies. This topology is synthesized with some series-connected identical H-bridge cells. CMI requires several isolated dc sources which brings about some difficulties when dealing with this type of inverter. This paper addresses the problem by proposing a switched-capacitor (SC)-based CMI. The proposed topology, which is referred to as switched-capacitor single-source CMI (SCSS-CMI), makes use of some capacitors instead of the dc sources. Hence, it requires only one dc source to charge the employed capacitors. Usually, the capacitor charging process in a SC cell is companied by some current spikes which extremely harm the charging switch and the capacitor. The capacitors in SCSS-CMI are charged through a simple auxiliary circuit which eradicates the mentioned current spikes and provides zero-current switching condition for the charging switch. A computer-aid simulated model along with a laboratory-built prototype is adopted to assess the performances of SCSS-CMI, under different conditions.
Jahan et al. (2018) studied this question.