Reliability and availability analysis of redundant BCHP (building cooling, heating and power) system

Abstract

Failure of a component in BCHP (building cooling, heating and power) system may result in failure of a sub-system or of the whole system. The reliability and availability analysis of BCHP system is helpful to the designer to decide the redundancy in case of equipment failure. This paper presents the redundant design of BCHP system and its operation mode. The SSM (state-space method) combined to the probabilistic analysis of Markov model, is employed to analyze the reliabilities of three forms of energy supply including electricity, heat and cool in BCHP system. The failure rate, the repair rate, the availability and the MTBF (mean time to failure) of the redundant and non-redundant BCHP systems are deduced and analyzed respectively. Then, a numerical case for the reliability analysis of the redundant and non-redundant BCHP systems is compared to the SP (separation production) system. Finally, the calculation results indicate that the reliability of the redundant BCHP system compared to the SP system obviously increases, and the failure rates of the electricity, heat and cool supplies decrease 99.63%, 94.30% and 99.97% respectively.