DEVELOPMENT OF A INTEGRATED FTA AND FMEA APPROACH FOR FAILURE ANALYSIS OF SOLAR PHOTOVOLTAIC SYSTEMS

Abstract

There is a need of an alternate source of energy that is both reliable and affordable. Solar PV system is one of the source which is reliable but it has higher cost. As technology advances, the cost of harvesting energy decreases, but their lifespan is determined by several process fault/factors and their mitigation which is true in case of solar photovoltaic systems. To mitigate the faults, industries use various fault analysis techniques such as FTA, FMEA, RBD, etc. FMEA is the most commonly used tools. The results of FMEA are dependent on the knowledge and experience of the team carrying out the process, which can change the ranking of the faults due to the vagueness of the ideas of a different team member. In the proposed methodology, fuzzy logic is used to counter the vagueness of the ideas of a different team member. The suggested methodology combines the FTA and FMEA approaches as these are both time-consuming and inefficient when used individually. An integrated FTA and fuzzy FMEA strategy uses the FTA data as input to the FMEA process, then applies fuzzy logic to generate the fuzzy RPN value to prioritize the sequence of failure modes to mitigate first. Twelve failure modes are considered in this work. The results produced utilizing the integrated technique differed significantly from the standard method for intermediate failure modes. The proposed methodology can be applied to any industry, including manufacturing, automobiles, and pharmaceuticals.