Power Plant Availability Engineering: Methods of Analysis, Program Planning, and Applications. Final Report

摘要

Availability engineering has its roots primarily in reliability work that is associated with the defense, communications, and aerospace industries. With respect to power plant applications, nuclear power plant risk analysis is an example of a more recent, important contributor to the technology of reliability and availability. This is particularly true in the systems modeling and data handling areas. Of course, the growing interest in more formal availability improvement programs in the power field has resulted in the most important resource for the advancement of power plant availability engineering. The keystone to contemporary availability analysis and engineering is its usefulness in making good decisions about power plant design and operations. The advocated approach fits the framework of a decision model, whereby different options for design, operations, etc., can be compared in terms of availability performance, costs, and benefits. The important building block needed for availability analysis to fit in a decision model is the quantification of uncertainty. Probability is adopted as the language of uncertainty. The concept of probability proposed is based on a state-of-knowledge approach. Such an approach provides the flexibility to model a plant and its systems at any point of the design or operations and with any data base (limited or comprehensive). The figures of merit (failure frequency, outage times, availability, etc.) are presented as probability distributions, thus.