This article presents a single-phase multilevel inverter with reduced switches technique to generate 9-level output voltage waveform during symmetric operation and 17-level output voltage waveform during asymmetric operation. The generation of firing angles for each power switches are tuned by using the Grey Wolf Optimization technique. The purpose of this study is to investigate the capability of the propose multilevel circuit on handling the different voltage injection to form the symmetrical and asymmetrical operation in a real hardware implementation. The proposed topology only used 10 units of power switches to from 17-level output voltage waveform compared to the conventional multilevel topology which requires 32 units of power switches. The reduction of power switches has significantly reduced the converter size as well as the power consumption for the controller and driver circuit. The feasibility of the proposed technique has been validated using MATLAB/Simulink software and through experimental results. The results will be focused on the harmonic performance and the amount of THD for asymmetrical is much lower compared to the symmetrical configuration.
