A Multi-state Reliability Model for a Gas Fueled Cogenerated Power Plant

Cogeneration plant consists of many equipment and distinguished by their structural complexity. Failure of a component can cause failure of a sub-system or the entire system with various adverse consequences such as loss of power may result in loss of production, in damage of production equipment and it may cause accidents. In such cases, the system failure can direct to reduce ability to carry out the particular task, but not to complete failure. Moreover, each system element can also perform its task with some various levels. For example, the generating unit in power system has its maximum generating capacity, which is fully obtainable if there are no failures. Some types of failure can cause complete unit outage, whereas other types of failure can cause a unit to work with reduced capacity. Therefore, reliability and availability have to be considered in the operation of power systems using multi-state system theory. Cogeneration power plant can have an arbitrary finite number of different states (task performance levels) the system is termed a multi-state system (MSS). This paper assesses the reliability and availability of cogeneration power plant using Markov model associated with universal generating function takes into account multistate models for all system components.