Reliability Analysis and Availability Enhancements for Redundant Systems With Reparable Components

Redundancy is widely used for enhancing a system’s overall availability. As an HTR demonstrated plant, a high temperature gas-cooled reactor pebble-bed module (HTR-PM) now is under construction in China and the construction will be completed around 2017. In HTR-PM, there are many devices and device groups used in a redundant way to guarantee the high availability of the related functions, especially the functions shared by two reactors during the entire life time. It is very important and necessary to determine their reliabilities as well as how to make a decision about the related maintenance policies to enhance their availabilities. In this paper, typical redundant styles in the HTR-PM are summarized and demonstrated. Accordingly, the theoretical models, which are able to describe the reliabilities of the redundant systems, are proposed based on Markov chain model. Moreover, for a specific redundant structure, the relationship between the availability and the maintenance period is analytically addressed. Based on the model, we address that: as the digital monitoring and control technologies are widely used in nuclear power plants, monitoring methods targeting for decreasing maintenance costs and meanwhile increasing the availabilities for different redundant styles are very beneficial.