International Journal of Advances in Applied Sciences (IJAAS) Vol. 8, No. 2, June 2019, pp. 143~153 ISSN: 2252-8814, DOI: 10.11591/ijaas.v8.i2.pp143-153  143 Journal homepage: http://iaescore.com/online/index.php/IJAAS Performance evaluation and comparison of diode clamped multilevel inverter and hybrid inverter based on PD and APOD modulation techniques N. Susheela, P. Satish Kumar Department of Electrical Engineering, Osmania University, India Article Info ABSTRACT Article history: Received Aug 29, 2018 Revised Apr 1, 2019 Accepted May 8, 2019 The popularity of multilevel inverters have increasing over the years in various applications without use of a transformer and has many benefits. This work presents the performance and comparative analysis of single phase diode clamped multilevel inverter and a hybrid inverter with reduced number of components. As there are some drawbacks of diode clamped multilevel inverter such as requiring higher number of components, PWM control method is complex and capacitor voltage balancing problem, an implementation of hybrid inverter that requires fewer components and less carrier signals when compared to conventional multilevel inverters is discussed. The performance of single phase diode clamped multilevel inverter and hybrid multilevel inverter for seven, nine and eleven levels is performed using phase disposition, alternate phase opposition disposition sinusoidal pulse width modulation techniques. Both the multilevel inverter are implemented for the above mentioned multicarrier based Pulse Width Modulation methods for R and R-L loads. The total harmonic distortion is evaluated at various modulation indices. The analysis of the multilevel inverters is done by simulation in matlab/simulink environment. Keywords: Diode clamped multilevel inverter Hybrid inverter Sinusoidal pulse width modulation Total harmonic distortion Copyright © 2019 Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved. Corresponding Author: N. Susheela, Department of Electrical Engineering, University College of Engineering, Osmania University, Hyderabad, Telangana, India. Email: nsusheela2007@yahoo.com 1. INTRODUCTION The multilevel inverter (MLI) is now proven technology for medium/high voltage high- power applications such as such as marine drives, variable-speed drives, reactive power compensation, steel rolling mills and other applications. The concept of power conversion in multilevel inverters (MLI) is to synthesize a staircase voltage waveform from several lower voltage DC sources which approaches the sinusoidal wave with reduced harmonic distortion has got several advantages and have drawn tremendous interest in high power high voltage applications [1-4]. In case of multilevel inverters the semiconductors are wired to form series type connection so that the operation at higher voltages is possible. The switching losses and the switching frequency can be reduced by staggering the switching because the switches are not truly series connected. Conventional multilevel inverters include neutral point clamped (diode-clamped) inverter, flying capacitor (capacitor clamped) inverter and cascaded H-bridge inverter. The major drawback of multilevel inverters is the