A new snubber circuit for multilevel inverter and converter

This paper proposes a new snubber circuit for multilevel inverter and converter. The snubber circuit makes use of the Undeland snubber as a basic snubber unit and can be regarded as a generalized Undeland snubber. The proposed snubber keeps such good features as fewer number of components, improved efficiency due to low loss snubber, capability of clamping overvoltage across main switching devices, and no unbalance problem of blocking voltage. Furthermore, the proposed concept of constructing a snubber circuit for multilevel inverter and converter can apply to any kind of basic snubber unit such as Holtz nondissipative snubber, McMurray efficient snubber, Lauritzen lossless snubber, etc. which have been utilized for a two-level inverter.