Sharif Digital Repository

Short circuit current is one of the major threats for power system stability. Power system should have the ability to detect and clear these faults within a specified time. The protection system can clear the faults only if the interruption capability of the circuit breakers is higher than the fault level. Expansion of the grid and installation of new power on the scale that is envisaged will require practical solutions to a number of technical challenges. One of the technical challenges is fault level management as system expansion often results in increased fault levels beyond the design limits of the existing switchgears. Replacing the old equipments particularly circuit breakers with the... 

Availability of a system is a crucial factor for planning and optimization. The concept is more challenging for modern systems such as robots and autonomous systems consisting of a complex configuration of components. In this paper, a reliability evaluation framework is developed for a system of binary state autonomous robots in an automated manufacturing environment. In this framework, the concepts in functional block diagram, table of truth, and sum of state are employed simultaneously to develop a binary state reliability model. Due to inefficacy of the method for larger number of components involved in complex systems, an extension of the Bernoulli trials is proposed. In an... 

Current design practice is usually to produce a safety system which meets a target level of performance that is deemed acceptable by the regulators. Safety systems are designed to prevent or alleviate the consequences of potentially hazardous events. In many modern industries the failure of such systems can lead to whole system breakdown. In reliability analysis of complex systems involving multiple components, it is assumed that the components have different failure rates with certain probabilities. This leads into extensive computational efforts involved in using the commonly employed generating function (GF) and the recursive algorithm to obtain reliability of systems consisting of a... 

This paper develops a reliability-based model for distribution network expansion planning (DNEP) studies. It incorporates the effects of distribution line maintenance in the planning studies to be considered as an alternative for the installation of feeders. To that end, at first, some models are introduced to effectively estimate the effects of maintenance activities budget on distribution lines' failure and repair rates. Therefore, the reliability data of distribution lines are updated in the reliability evaluation studies of distribution networks. Then, these models are involved in the formulation of DNEP problem which is introduced as a multi-objective optimization model. The developed... 

The use of Solid State Drives (SSDs) has been increased in storage systems due to high performance and low power consumption. However, some inherent properties of SSDs result in different behavior for SSDs in comparison with Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). As an inherent property, the Bit Error Rate (BER) of SSDs increases, when the number of Program/Erase (P/E) cycles arises. This increment leads to two effects in an array of SSDs during its operation: (1) different BER on different SSDs of the system (SSD-variant BER), and (2) different BER in different time moments (time-variant BER). With respect to these two effects, the reliability evaluation of SSD-based RAIDs would be different from... 

Current design practice is usually to produce a safety system which meets a target level of performance that is deemed acceptable by the regulators. Safety systems are designed to prevent or alleviate the consequences of potentially hazardous events. In many modern industries the failure of such systems can lead to whole system breakdown. In reliability analysis of complex systems involving multiple components, it is assumed that the components have different failure rates with certain probabilities. This leads into extensive computational efforts involved in using the commonly employed generating function (GF) and the recursive algorithm to obtain reliability of systems consisting of a... 

In this paper, minimal paths and cuts technique is developed to handle fault tree analysis (FTA) on the critical components of industrial robots. This analysis is integrated with the reliability block diagram (RBD) approach in order to investigate the robot system reliability. The model is implemented in a complex advanced manufacturing system having autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs) as material handling devices. FTA grants cause and effects and hierarchical properties to the model. On the other hand, RBD simplifies the complex system of the AGVs for reliability evaluation. The results show that due to the filtering of the paths in a manufacturing system for AGVs, the reliability is highly... 

Secure operation of protective intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) has been recognized as a crucial issue for power grids. By gaining access to substation IEDs, intruders can severely disrupt the operation of protection systems. This paper develops an analytical reliability assessment framework for quantifying the impacts of the hypothesized integrity attacks against protection systems. Petri net models are used to simulate possible intrusion scenarios into substation networks. The cyber network model is constructed from firewall, intrusion prevention system (IPS), and password models, which are three types of defense mechanisms for protecting substation networks. In this paper, two main... 

In this paper the reliability of distribution network is modeled in joint multistage expansion planning of distribution network assets and distributed generations (DGs). The imposed costs due to network reliability weakness are considerable in the distribution level. Therefore in the proposed model distribution network operator (DNO) considers the costs associated with load interruptions in the planning problem. In this regard, reliability evaluation of the network is modeled in the joint multistage distribution network expansion planning (MDNEP) problem in an integrated manner while the network topology is unknown until the planning problem is not solved. In the proposed joint MDNEP problem... 

This article explores the impacts of non-exponentially distributed failures on reliability of microgrids. Failure rate of some components such as power electronic converters is not constant, while they play a major role in microgrids. Consequently, their failure characteristics will affect the microgrid reliability. Hence, the conventional reliability evaluation approaches based on mean time to failure may introduce inaccurate inputs for decision making in planning and operation of microgrids. In this article, different approaches are employed for evaluating the reliability of microgrids with non-constant failure rates. The obtained results indicate that the system reliability remarkably... 

In this article, a new soft switching isolated push-pull dc-dc converter using a three-winding transformer is proposed. The proposed hybrid resonant and pulse width modulated converter employs a conventional push-pull structure in the primary side, a voltage doubler in the secondary side, and a bidirectional switch besides the transformer, altogether help offering a high efficiency over a wide range of input and output voltage signals with an unsophisticated fixed-frequency control mechanism. The primary-side switches are commutated under zero voltage switching with low switching current and the secondary-side diodes are commutated under zero current switching. In this article, we first... 

This article offers a holistic model and approach on reliability assessment of conventional isolated multiswitch pulsewidth modulation dc-dc (IMSDC-DC) power electronic converters with conventional half-bridge, full-bridge, and push-pull dc-dc topologies. The proposed reliability assessment analytics encapsulate correlated effects of several conditions (e.g., open- and short-circuit faults) and prevailing parameters (e.g., duty cycle, input voltage, output power, transformer turns ratio, voltage gain, switching frequency, operation time duration, and components characteristics) on the overall reliability performance of IMSDC-DC converters. Such insights are then harnessed within a Markov... 

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... 

In the new deregulated environment of electric power utility industry, new system reliability criteria and analytical tools are required. This paper proposes an analytical probabilistic model for reliability evaluation of competitive electricity markets. The market reliability is evaluated by using Markov state space diagram. Since the market is a continuously operated system, the concept of absorbing states is applied to it in order to evaluate the reliability. The market states are identified by using market performance indices and the transition rates are calculated by using historical data. To illustrate interesting feature of the proposed methodology, a case study is carried out over a... 

Purpose - This paper aims to conduct a comprehensive fault tree analysis (FTA) on the critical components of industrial robots. This analysis is integrated with the reliability block diagram (RBD) approach to investigate the robot system reliability. Design/methodology/approach - For practical implementation, a particular autonomous guided vehicle (AGV) system was first modeled. Then, FTA was adopted to model the causes of failures, enabling the probability of success to be determined. In addition, RBD was used to simplify the complex system of the AGV for reliability evaluation purpose. Findings - Hazard decision tree (HDT) was configured to compute the hazards of each component and the...