A comprehensive review on single DC source multilevel inverters for renewable energy applications.

Multilevel inverters (MIs) are widely used in voltage source inverter applications due to their advantages of high-quality output voltage waveform, low power loss and low voltage stress. Compared with multiple DC source MI (MDCS-MI), single DC source MI (SDCS-MI) needs one DC source. This makes SDCS-MI more simplified and avoid voltage unevenness among multiple sources, which are advantageous in renewable energy (RE) applications. In order to understand SDCS-MI, this paper classifies and compares existing SDCS-MIs according to classical topologies based on isolated and non-isolated construction, summarizes the advantages and limitations of each type of topologies, and briefly introduces various control strategies of SDCS-MI. Finally, this paper discusses the SDCS-MI in RE systems. In addition, the development trend of SDCS-MI is also analyzed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]