Comparison between Different Electrical Configurations of Emergency Diesel Generators for Redundancy and Reliability Improving

Abstract

The failure of an emergency diesel generator could cause a blackout with economic or human losses, especially if it occurs in a hospital. The authors performed an up to date statistic on diesel generators fails has been investigated in a hundred of hospitals. Although standard maintenance operation has been correctly performed, it has been found a 6 % of failures for the genset per year. MTBF of generators and main components have been investigated and updated values are reported in this paper. Components reliability is proved to be at its maximum technological value, consequently an innovative solution is here proposed. Often neighboring buildings or different electrical systems have separated emergency generators. Nowadays, in case of genset failure, most of the electrical installations are not designed to be fed from other generators. Several electrical configurations for diesel generators interconnections have been studied, in order to guarantee the mutual succor between them and therefore improving reliability. Two innovative schemes for emergency generators connection are here proposed for a more reliable electrical design.