Power losses of multilevel converters in terms of the number of the output voltage levels

Abstract

This paper presents loss calculation methods of which the multilevel converters have several number of the output voltage level. The multilevel converters of the flying capacitor topology and the active neutral point clamp topology are evaluated in terms of the high efficiency in this paper. In addition, the power losses of the multilevel converters are discussed using two power devices. As a result, in case of the MOSFET device, the active neural point clamp topology is better than the flying capacitor topology, regardless of the number of level. The power loss of the two-level inverter is lower than other topologies.