Reliability estimation of Sahel Tunisian railway drive system

The authors present the reliability performances of Sahel Tunisian railway drive system. The fault tree analysis is introduced and the maintenance reports are used to estimate failure rate and confidence interval of converter components. The stress factors are analysed to study their influences on the failure rates. It is shown that the k-out-of-n redundancy improves reliability of the system since the loss of a thyristor or diode does not stop the motor.