Fuzzy Reliability and Availability of System under a Calendar-based Inspection Involving Multiple Failures and Its Application to Wind Turbine System

Abstract

Uncertainty is an important factor that needs to be considered while analyzing the performance of any engineering system. In order to quantify uncertainty, fuzzy set theory is frequently used by most of researchers, including energy system experts. According to the classical reliability theory, component lifetimes have crisp parameters, but due to uncertainty and inaccuracy in data, it is sometimes very difficult to determine the exact values of these parameters in real-world systems. To overcome this difficulty in the current research, failure and repair rates were taken as triangular fuzzy numbers to determine the fuzzy availability of a system undergoing calendar-based periodic inspection subject to multiple failure modes (FMs). It was assumed that each component in the system had an exponential failure rate and repair rate with fuzzy parameters. System FMs were explicitly taken into account when a functional state of the system was considered. Each FM had a random failure time. On the occurrence of any failure, a random time was selected for the relevant corrective repair work. The proposed research was studied for one of the major sources of green energy, namely a wind turbine system wherein all the derived propositions have been implemented on it.

Keywords

Fuzzy reliability / fuzzy availability / wind turbine system / multiple failure modes / triangular fuzzy number

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