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Wolfson Lecture Series: Pioneering Interoperability in Multi-Vendor HVDC Grids

• 29 April 2025
• 4pm-5pm

About this event

On 29 April, as a part of the Wolfson Lecture Series, Dr Dong Chen of the National HVDC Centre is visiting Zhengyu Lin and has kindly agreed to give a research presentation to the wider School, titled 'Interoperability in Multi-Vendor HVDC Grids: The Aquila Interoperability Project and Stability Challenges in Offshore Networks'. This presentation too will be approximately 40 minutes, with a Q&A session to follow.

Abstract

This presentation explores Great Britain’s groundbreaking Aquila project - the world’s first business case for an offshore multi-vendor, multi-terminal HVDC grid. We examine how the Aquila Interoperability (Lite) innovation project directly informs this real-world deployment, while addressing critical industry challenges: operational stability under conflicting control initiatives and intellectual property protection in collaborative environments.
The discussion then focuses on control architecture design, introducing a novel methodology to quantify the domain of operating points as a prerequisite for small-signal stability assessment. From a Transmission System Operator’s perspective, we clarify the physical definition and operational implications of small-signal stability in complex HVDC grids.
A dedicated technical segment presents a frequency-domain compliance testing procedure specifically adapted for non-minimum-phase MIMO HVDC systems. The analysis includes comparative review of alternative approaches:

• Traditional SISO frequency-domain assessment
  
• Impedance passivity criteria
  
• Nyquist assessment/Cauchy’s argument principles
  
• State-space analysis
  
• Vector fitting techniques

Dr Dong Chen

Dong Chen is a Senior Power System Engineer at the National HVDC Centre, where he leads a team pioneering the deployment of Great Britain’s first HVDC grid and mitigating risks against interoperability. He has filed 3 patents (since 2022) to standardize HVDC converter interoperability and recently achieved the world’s first multi-vendor, multi-terminal HVDC demonstration in an RTDS environment.