Basic design of an HVDC interconnection in Brazil.

Sammanfattning: HVDC technologies are very effective on long distance power transmission but generally raise large interrogations as how to determine an effective configuration. This thesis propose part of an optimization process in order to determine an optimal configuration for an HVDC installation, emphasizing in this report the impact of the conductor selection and of the filter design.  The conductor selection, including varying voltages raises concern about the knowledge of the energy cost evolution in order to determine its optimum and a sensitivity analysis is proposed to evaluate the impact of this factor on the final design. The conductor selection approach made it possible to determine the key parameters in choosing a conductor which are the radius and number of conductors. Different types of conductors and configurations were compared with different scenari for energy cost in order to determine the most economical conductor.  Filter design is a matter that concerns both the internal components and the AC components of the HVDC station but can also be considered as an optimization process, considering the total losses of the filters and the total harmonic distortion and using a minimax approach.  The optimization approach, based on a Newton-Raphson algorithm, made it possible to determine an optimal combination of filters in order to account for all the power range in the HVDC link. It was observed that even though the actual choice for the design was close to the final design selected, it was not optimal for low power harmonics.