Nuc Eng


Reference Info
-->Failure
System Failure Modeling

Analytic methods of evaluating failure of complex systems provide good insight and are in wide use for evaluating plant design, operation and safety. Analytic methods, for example fault tree analysis, entails Boolean algebra evaluation for each and every failure path that is deemed important. For complex systems this is a daunting (and error prone) task which has to be re-evaluated and re-calculated whenever there are associated system changes. In addition, in some cases, the system of components cannot be broken down into subsystems of series and parallel logical components that are required for analytic techniques. Incorporating partial component failures and time dependent events are further complications that can make analytic analysis intractable.

For failure dynamics, numerical simulation provides a powerful complement to analytic methods in much the same way that it does for standard system analysis. Herein, a simple system is developed that can be used as a starting point for specific explorations.