Power flow analysis of multi-terminal HVDC networks

Abstract

Availability of suitable converter technologies added with increasing demands for HVDC connection, especially in the North Sea area, opens the potential for establishing multi-terminal HVDC grid. Such dc network requires a separate power flow analysis method as opposed to the conventional method employed for ac network problems. This paper discusses a numerical iteration method based upon the Newton-Raphson approximation for analysing power flow in multi-terminal HVDC networks. The method was tested to analyse the power flow of a five terminal HVDC grid. It was observed that even with poor initial guesses of the unknown nodal voltages; the iterative method was giving a convergent solution of the required error margin within few iteration steps.