Department of Water Resources Development and Management, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India
Reliability of power supply to a region depends on the performance of the power plant. Hydropower plants are one of the major sources of power supply. However, the hydropower station is a complex system consisting of large number of components which are subject to failure. Fault tree analysis is a top down approach of analysing event failures leading to an undesirable event (i.e., failure of the system). It is one of major and sophisticated tool for evaluating the effect of component failure on the overall performance of complex systems. Fault tree can be used to assess the probability of failure of a system, to compare design alternatives, to identify critical events that will significantly contribute to the failure of the system, and to determine the sensitivity of the probability of failure of the system to various contributions of basic events. In this paper, performance in terms of the probability of failure of a hydropower station due to various component failures has been carried out using the fault tree analysis approach. Such analysis helps in examination of a complex system of interactions and the processes which affects the overall performance. The paper describes the application of fault tree analysis approach to a typical run off river type hydropower station so as to quantify its overall performance. The methodology has been illustrated with the help of a real time case study.
