Analysis, modelling and simulation of an HVDC converter using OpenModelica

Abstract

More and more countries are developing new research and industry centers (the Indian city of Hyderabad is a good example of countries with a huge population having needing more and more energy supply). Building roads, local industry, technological centers and raising the standard of living of the population must be a right for any country which development was truncated by colonization or by inner tensions. To do all of this, a huge amount of energy is needed. The energetic transition is necessary to provide the communities the increasing electric power needed and to generate it using renewable sources, reducing our negative impact on the planet. The renewable energy depends on the geographical conditions, a generating station can not be built wherever. So, one of the biggest challenges of the energetic transition is to transmit power through long distances as some areas are not adequate to produce energy from renewable sources. In order to transmit this power through long distances, the HVDC technology is chosen as it is reliable and presents low transmission losses for long distances. So, with the objective of uniting free software and energetic transition, this thesis will present the simulation and analysis of a HVDC using OpenModelica, which is free and open-source software, therefore anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source code is openly shared. Also, this thesis will try to present the limitations of the program as a lot of features are still in development. The initial goal of the project was to simulate electrical grid components with free software and using parallel computing. As explained further in the report, the parallelization of the simulation has been dismissed. So, the goal of this thesis is to analyze the structure and control of a Modular Multi-level Converter in a HVDC transmission using free software.