Reliability and availability assessment of electrical and mechanical systems

Ensuring reliable electric power to critical equipment is vital to the operation of many industrial, commercial, and military facilities. Accurate assessments of electrical system reliability are needed to determine if improvements are necessary and, in many cases, these assessments are required as a part of any new construction. However, it is generally impossible to perform actual testing on the system and hand calculations are also impossible for all but the most trivial systems. There are computer modeling tools which calculate system reliability or availability for electrical or mechanical systems based on the reliability of individual components, how those components are interconnected, and performance criteria for the system based on facility requirements. Other computer modeling tools are frequently cumbersome to use, require access to a mainframe computer, and base the results on suspect data complied in the 1970s. The Reliability and Availability Modeling Program (RAMP) is designed to perform reliability analysis using component operational and maintenance data on 242 items in the categories of power generation, power distribution, and HVAC. The authors describe the main features of RAMP, its software, and its use.