Sharif Digital Repository

The number of harmonic-producing sources is rapidly growing in the power grid due to the increased penetration of power electronic-interfaced resources (such as wind turbines, photovoltaic systems, and energy storage units) and proliferation of nonlinear loads. Many researchers have investigated the effects of non-sinusoidal waveforms on the performance of different types of protective relays, and have reported some harmonic-related malfunctions. This paper presents a detailed Markov model that captures different impacts of harmonics on the reliability of overcurrent relays. In addition to addressing relevant considerations of the previous reliability models, this model accounts for new... 

Depending on the application in which power electronic converters (PECs) are deployed, failure processes may endanger the desirable performance of PECs. This paper offers holistic insights on reliability modeling of PECs considering dependencies in two simultaneous failure processes, namely gradual wearing-out degradation and vibration sudden degradation. While sudden and gradual degradation processes may individually affect the useful lifetime of PECs, their mutual interdependencies could significantly accelerate the aging mechanisms. A new analytical model for reliability assessment of PECs is proposed that can capture such mutual interdependence of simultaneous failure processes. The... 

A probabilistic method is proposed in this study to predict the spreading profile of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the United State (US) via time-variant reliability analysis. To this end, an extended susceptible-exposed-infected-vaccinated-recovered (SEIVR) epidemic model is first established deterministically, considering the quarantine and vaccination effects, and then applied to the available COVID-19 data from US. Afterwards, the prediction results are described as a time-series of the number of people infected, recovered, and dead. Upon introducing the extended SEIVR model into a limit-state function and defining the model parameters including transmission, recovery, and... 

Emergence of Solid-State Drives (SSDs) have evolved the data storage industry where they are rapidly replacing Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) due to their superiority in performance and power. Meanwhile, SSDs have reliability issues due to bit errors, bad blocks, and bad chips. To help reliability, Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) configurations, originally proposed to increase both performance and reliability of HDDs, are also applied to SSD arrays. However, the conventional reliability models of HDD RAID cannot be intactly applied to SSD arrays, as the nature of failures in SSDs are totally different from HDDs. Previous studies on the reliability of SSD arrays are based on the... 

This paper develops a general framework for reliability assessment of multi-microgrid (MMG) distribution systems. It also investigates reliability impacts of coordinated outage management strategies in a MMG distribution network. According to the proposed reliability evaluation framework, which is based on sequential Monte Carlo simulation method, distribution system is divided into smaller sections/microgrids based on protection system configuration and operating measures are efficiently simulated considering different operation modes. In order to demonstrate the role of outage management strategy in reliability performance of MMG distribution systems, at first, the required features of an... 

This article proposes a multi-objective goal programming based approach with two objectives of maximizing the reliability and minimizing the placement cost of Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) for full observability in power systems. The weighted sum goal programming formulation incorporates the reliability of individual PMUs and finds a placement to resolve the conflicting objectives of minimum number of PMUs cost-wise and maximum level of system-wide reliability. This multi-objective problem is formulated as a nonlinear goal programming model in which weights are associated with the objectives. The model is solved for several weight scenarios for the IEEE 14, 30, 57 and 118 bus test systems.... 

In this paper, a Markov model for reliability analysis of transmission lines equipped with a dynamic thermal rating (DTR) system is proposed. Moreover, a fuzzy procedure is proposed to determine an annual equivalent fuzzy DTR number to represent hourly variations of the line DTR. To implement the fuzzy annual DTR in composite system reliability analysis, an interactive method resolution technique for solving fuzzy optimization problems is developed. This method is chosen to address the fuzzy constraints associated with the lines equipped with the DTR system. Numerical results are presented using the 24-bus IEEE RTS, and demonstrate the validity of the proposed approaches  

Of particular interest to restrict the short-circuit level of interconnected power systems is to exploit fault current limiter (FCL) technologies. FCLs let the system planners devise new reliable and rather economical substation configurations and provide the possibility of proposing a promising cost-effective and prompt solution to the fault current over duty problem in the existing substations. This paper attempts to assess reliability of substation architectures accommodating the FCL operation and, besides, numerically investigates the FCL's impacts on the substation reliability indices. In order to clarify the proposed approach, two case studies with and without FCL are analyzed and... 

This paper presents a novel approach for evaluating the reliability of protective systems taking into account its components reliability. In this paper, a previously proposed extended model is used for a directional over- current scheme. In the extended model, the impacts of individual protective components are taken into account. An optimum routine test schedule is determined for each protective component as a separate unit. A comparison is made to show that the proposed approach has excellence over conventional routine test inspections. Impacts of factors such as circuit breaker inadvertent opening, required time for performing routine test inspections, human mistakes and self-checking and... 

Different models have been proposed for deposition of asphaltene on reservoir rocks that due to complexity of asphaltene nature, most of them have not been productive. Here, a reliable model is proposed which despite of previous models, considers the change in asphaltene saturation in the core. The obtained experimental data in the laboratory was used for model validation. In this work, a series of core flooding tests was carried out in presence of connate water at different solvent-oil volume ratios. Pressure drop was measured at three different terminals along the core. The obtained experimental data as well as mass balance equations, momentum equation, asphaltene deposition and... 

Protective relay technologies have evolved from single-function electromechanical and static relays to modern multifunction digital relays over the past few years. Protection systems play a vital role in maintaining a desirable level of reliability in power systems. Thus, their own reliability should be evaluated and any cause of their malfunction should be fully comprehended. In this paper, a new reliability model is proposed that associates protection system failures to four main causes: 1) relay hardware, 2) relay software, 3) ancillary equipment, and 4) human error. In addition, this model can take other aspects of the protection system into consideration, such as human error during... 

Probabilistic analyses of a wide-area measurement system (WAMS) would require equivalent reliability models for its components which include phasor measurement units (PMUs). In this paper, the reliability modeling of PMU is proposed and the proposed model is extended to consider options for the PMU hardware. The Markov process is employed to analyze the proposed model and to present an equivalent two-state model of PMUs. Reliability parameters of PMU are estimated with major difficulties associated with limited and uncertain data. In this paper, uncertainties are taken into account to achieve more realistic estimates of PMU characteristics. Fuzzy sets along with reliability analyses and... 

Reliability evaluation of multiterminal HVDC systems has received very little attention in the past. This paper presents reliability modeling and analysis of an HVDC transmission system incorporating a voltage-sourced converter (VSC) tapping station. The use of VSC tapping stations enables the supply of power along the route to areas with comparatively little consumption. In this paper, a comprehensive detailed reliability model is developed and then converted to a manageable and computationally efficient model. Using this equivalent reliability model, various reliability indices are calculated at the load point of the system and the impacts of the VSC tapping station on these indices are... 

This paper proposes and evaluates Low-overhead, Reliable Switch (LRS) architecture to enhance the reliability of Network-on-Chips (NoCs). The proposed switch architecture exploits information and hardware redundancies to eliminate retransmission of faulty flits. The LRS architecture creates a redundant copy of each newly received flit and stores the redundant flit in a duplicated flit buffer that is associated with the incoming channel of the flit. Flit buffers in the LRS are equipped with information redundancy to detect probable bit flip errors. When an error is detected in a flit buffer, its duplicated buffer is used to recover the correct value of the flit. In this way, the propagation... 

The Burr XII distribution can closely approximate many other well-known probability density functions such as the normal, gamma, lognormal, exponential distributions as well as Pearson type I, II, V, VII, IX, X, XII families of distributions. Considering a wide range of shape and scale parameters of the Burr XII distribution, it can have an important role in reliability modeling, risk analysis and process capability estimation. However, estimating parameters of the Burr XII distribution can be a complicated task and the use of conventional methods such as maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and moment method (MM) is not straightforward. Some tables to estimate Burr XII parameters have been... 

This paper proposes a reliability model for the electrical subassemblies of geared wind turbine systems with induction generators. The model is derived considering the failure of main subassemblies and their parameters are calculated. A productivity comparison is performed between the selected wind turbine systems including reliability issues. Two methods of modification for variable-speed wind turbines with Doubly Fed Induction Generators (DFIG) to improve their availability are finally suggested  

In this paper, an analytical approach for the reliability modeling of large wind farms is presented. A systematic method based on frequency and duration approach is utilized to model a wind farm like a multistate conventional unit, where the probability, frequency of occurrence, and departure rate of each state can be obtained using the regional wind regime of wind farm and wind turbine characteristics. The proposed method is capable of finding both annual frequency and average time of load curtailment analytically in the presence of wind power. A wind farm in the northern region of Iran with the wind speed registration of one year is studied in this paper. To accommodate time-varying... 

This paper evaluates the reliability impact of UPFC application in power system. The paper proposes a new reliability model for the UPFC which is capable of considering different operating states of UPFC. The model is then applied to a test system to study the reliability impacts of UPFC. The impacts of operating points of different states of the model on the system reliability are analyzed. The role of model parameters in reliability impacts of UPFC is analyzed through the sensitivity analysis. A comparative study is finally conducted to illustrate the applicability of the proposed model compare to that of existing UPFC reliability models. The abilities and deficiencies of the proposed... 

This paper probes the impact of utilizing an IPFC on the reliability indices of interconnected power systems. First, a concise presentation of IPFC and its structure are provided and the reliability model of two unequally-rated parallel transmission lines equipped with IPFC is then extracted. The assumed IPFC is composed from two parallel converting bridges associated with each line. Afterwards, based-on equivalent assisting unit approach, different commonly-used adequacy indices including the loss of load expectation (LOLE), loss of energy expectation (LOEE) and system minutes (SM) are calculated. A set of numerical analyses are conducted to illustrate the sensitivity of these indices with... 

One of the most important aspects in evaluating system reliability is to have a complete understanding of the engineering implications of the system and its associated components. The next step involved in reliability assessment is to appropriately model the system components to represent their characteristics and functions in the overall system. The unified power flow controller (UPFC) is an important flexible AC transmission system controller that can be used to enhance power system reliability. A complete reliability model of a UPFC is developed. A UPFC consists of three subsystems, and a reliability model associated with each subsystem is developed. The individual equivalent models are...