Reliability Analysis of Load-SharingK-out-of-NSystem Considering Component Degradation

Abstract

TheK-out-of-Nconfiguration is a typical form of redundancy techniques to improve system reliability, where at leastK-out-of-Ncomponents must work for successful operation of system. When the components are degraded, more components are needed to meet the system requirement, which means that the value ofKhas to increase. The current reliability analysis methods overestimate the reliability, because using constantKignores the degradation effect. In a load-sharing system with degrading components, the workload shared on each surviving component will increase after a random component failure, resulting in higher failure rate and increased performance degradation rate. This paper proposes a method combining a tampered failure rate model with a performance degradation model to analyze the reliability of load-sharingK-out-of-Nsystem with degrading components. The proposed method considers the value ofKas a variable which is derived by the performance degradation model. Also, the load-sharing effect is evaluated by the tampered failure rate model. Monte-Carlo simulation procedure is used to estimate the discrete probability distribution ofK. The case of a solar panel is studied in this paper, and the result shows that the reliability considering component degradation is less than that ignoring component degradation.