Predicting the design life of high integrity rotating electrical machines

This paper has shown that it is possible to assemble a predicted MTBF from generic data about the components and subsystems of an electrical machine. The paper has shown that, provided the failure rate data is carefully chosen, these MTBF predictions will be pessimistic but realistic. In general, high integrity machines can achieve a design life well in excess of 20 years with an MTBF, calculated for the military environment, in excess of 50,000 hrs. The paper has also shown that a wealth of industrial data is available in surveys and can be used to check the validity of predictions of MTBF. However, care needs to be taken to ensure that the MTBF predictions are made using similar operating time and failure mode states as the survey being used for validation. Finally, the paper shows how to use this data to design reliability into the electrical machine