The emerging active-neutral-point-clamped (ANPC) inverters with voltage-boosting capability are attractive for their low dc-link voltage requirement. These low voltage requirements enable a single-stage dc-Ac power conversion, which improves the overall efficiency, reliability, and power density of the system. A high voltage gain of 1.5 was demonstrated in recent boost type ANPC topology; however, it was achieved at the expense of high voltage stress on some of its switching devices. This brief proposes an improved topology with reduced voltage stress and a lower number of components while retaining the merits of high voltage gain. The proposed topology is a hybrid of a T-Type inverter and an H-bridge, which require only one floating capacitor and one less power switch than the aforementioned topology. One floating capacitor with self-voltage balancing capability is integrated to generate 7 output voltage levels. The proposed topology is analyzed and compared with recent boost ANPC topologies. Experimental results are presented for validation.
Manuscript received May 28, 2019; accepted October 8, 2019. Date of publication October 11, 2019; date of current version October 5, 2020. This work was supported in part by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT for \u201cFirst-Mover Program for Accelerating Disruptive Technology Development\u201d under Grant NRF-2018M3C1B9088457, in part by the Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning (KETEP), granted financial resource from the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy, South Korea, for \u201cHuman Resources Program in Energy Technology\u201d under Grant 20194030202370, and in part by the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education through Fundamental Research Grant Scheme under Grant FRGS/1/2018/TK04/USMC/02/1. This brief was recommended by Associate Editor H.-J. Chiu. (Corresponding author: Kyo-Beum Lee.) S. S. Lee is with the Newcastle Research and Innovation Institute, Newcastle University, Singapore (e-mail: szesinglee@gmail.com).
