Reactor reliability modeling and reliable life analysis method for multi-state space reactor systems based on DBN and interval estimation

Abstract

Space nuclear reactor power (space reactor) is of the highest energy density and the most promising long-term self-sustaining and high-power level space power source. Achieving high reliability during the years-long maintenance-free service process is one of the bottlenecks that constrain the application of space reactors, which brings a challenging task on the quantitative evaluation of reliability indicators (life and reliability) of space reactors during the design phase. On the one hand, traditional binary reliability theory cannot model the system functional structure accurately, due to diverse failure modes and complex propagation paths; on the other hand, the lack of reliability data introduces large epistemic uncertainty, resulting from high costs and time-consuming ground reliability tests. To tackle these problems, this paper takes the Stirling integrated space reactor (ACMIR) as a specific research object and proposes a general reactor reliability modeling and reliable life analysis method for space reactors with large prior epistemic uncertainty which is robust to manipulation and can obtain system reliability indicators with small confidence intervals for engineering decisions. First, based on experts’ experience, the functional logic relationship between components and system is sorted out by the failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) and the prior failure rates of components are evaluated according to the failure grade of the industrial standard. Then, the FMEA model is mapped to a discrete-time Bayesian network (DBN) to model the system reliable life, based on which system reliability indicators with low epistemic uncertainty are analyzed by interval estimation. Finally, the practical and engineering value of the proposed method is demonstrated with the example of ACMIR in two application cases.