Reliability analysis of captive power plant system where the working of standby unit depends on connecting unit

Abstract

Captive power plants usually operate parallel to the gridline to overcome the losses associated with power failures. While the connectivity of the power plant and gridline highly depends on the functioning of the electrical breaker. This study reveals the importance of connecting device breakers in a captive power plant to operate the system at full or reduced capacity and safer it from reverse feeding. Using semi-Markov processes reliability model is developed for steam turbine generators interconnected with gridline by an electric breaker. The expressions are formed for reliability measures like mean time to system failure, availability, busy period, and profit using regenerative point techniques. Also, these measures are evaluated numerically using an actual dataset belonging to a captive power plant. Graphical plotting shows a decline in profit with increasing the failure rates of turbine generators, gridline, and working probability of breaker. The revenue per unit uptime of the system is forecasted to get productive profit with different failure rates of the power generator.