Reliability Assessment of Redundant Electrical Power Supply Systems using Fault Tree Analysis, Reliability Block Diagram, and Monte Carlo Simulation Methods

Abstract

This paper deals with the reliability assessment of electrical power supply systems under redundancy. For doing so, three probabilistic safety analysis (PSA) methods are proposed and developed namely fault tree analysis (FTA), reliability block diagram (RBD), and Monte Carlo Simulation (MC) method. The FTA method is performed using RiskSpectrumPSA® software and the RBD and MC methods are coded using Matlab software. The electrical power supply system reliability is analyzed and enhanced considering various cases of redundancy. The FTA method is based on qualitative and quantitative reliability assessment. The quantitative assessment calculates the failure probability of the top event, and the qualitative approach determines the minimal cut sets (MCS). However, the RBD and MC methods are proposed to compute the system failure probability. The considered methods are applied on three case studies and the obtained results are compared to each other. The obtained results show that the three methods provide almost the same results. Furthermore, the reliability of the electrical power supply is clearly enhanced with the number of redundant components.