Novel Multilevel Inverter Circuit with Solar-Thermal Energy Conversion for Low-Power Applications

Harnessing renewable energy offers the most promising path toward sustainable power generation and advancing to a low-carbon future. The importance of harvesting sustainable energy emerged in the late 19th century and has steadily evolved into a global priority today. In this context China stands at the forefront as the world’s leading powerhouse in renewable energy production, while Bahrain remains the smallest contributor. This highlights the urgent need for sustainable power. Therefore, stronger energy policies need to be adopted for promoting and encouraging clean energy production across the globe. Also incremental innovations are essential to support low-power devices. One such advancement is proposed in this paper, where the solar energy is harvested by a thermoelectric generator (TEG), which converts heat into a stable DC voltage. Further, the stable DC voltage is fed to a novel topology of multilevel inverter to produce AC voltage across the load with minimum harmonic presence. The design is carried out in a way that the inverter setup looks compact with low cost, enabling efficiency for low-voltage AC applications. In continuation with this, the design is modeled in MATLAB, and the performance of the TEG with inverter is studied for resistive and impedance loads. From the study, it is found that the TEG with inverter performs better, and it is suitable for applications that need minimum voltages.