A Cascaded H-bridge with Integrated Boosting Circuit

This letter proposes a multilevel inverter (MLI), which can be considered to be belonging to the cascaded H-bridge (CHB) family. In the proposed MLI, some of the H-bridges are connected to dc-sources, whereas most of the H-bridges are connected to only floating capacitors. A boosting circuit is integrated in the CHB, which permits charging the floating capacitors, enabling a higher voltage at the inverter's output with respect to the dc-sources total one. This boosting feature is essential in some applications, such as photovoltaic and fuel cell systems. Compared to the popular solutions in the literature, the proposal still offers a high boosting ratio with fewer employed components. A prototype of the proposed MLI has been built, and the results confirming its validity are shown in this letter. Efficiency analysis and evaluation with respect to one of the conventional solutions is also presented, where it is demonstrated that the proposal shows an improvement of 3.94% according to the European efficiency.