Reliability Evaluation of Emergency and Standby Power Systems

Methodology for reliability modeling and evaluation of emergency and standby power systems is presented and illustrated by developing reliability models of a standby engine generator set and a redundant uninterruptible power supply system. These models and methods can compute quantitative reliability indices such as number of failures per year, downtime hours per year, and the mean downtime. These quantitative indices can play an important role in the selection and application of emergency and standby power systems by allowing trade-off studies to be made between reliability and other factors such as cost.