OPTIMAL AVAILABILITY ANALYSIS OF BRAKE DRUM MANUFACTURING SYSTEM BY USING MARKOVIAN APPROACH

Abstract

In this thesis availability analysis is carried out for a Brake Drum manufacturing system using Markovian approach with the purpose to improve its operational availability. The analysis helped in identifying the key factors that affects the system reliability and there exists good scope to improve the system availability by controlling the contributing factors. Separate models are developed for active and passive redundancy cases. All the feasible states and, failure and repair transitions are identified to develop the system model. Keeping in mind the limitation of the Markov model the failure and repair rates are taken as constant. The set of ordinary differential equations are obtained for the change of probability of being in respective system states with respect to time in each model. This system of rate equations is solved using Runge- Kutta method in MATLAB. The system availability assessment is based in the sum of probabilities of all working states. Sensitivity analysis is also carried out by varying the repair rates of constituent components in the system which helped in identifying the critical factors and assessing their impact on the system availability. These results are helpful to identify the more sensible elements for overall plant availability and suggest some maintenance and operational action to reduce down-time and maintenance costs.