A Study on the Application of Composite Reliability to Estimate the EDG Reliability

A commercial nuclear power station contains at least two emergency diesel generators(EDG) to control the risk of severe core damage during station blackout accidnets. Therefore, thereliability of the EDG's to start and load-run on demand must be maintained at a sufficiently high level. Until now, a simple assessment of start and load-run success rates was used to calculate the EDG reliability. However, this method has been found to contain many defects. Recently, the work of Martz et al.(1996) proposed the use of the Bayes estimator to find EDG reliability. Shim(1996) proposed a confidence interval for the Bayes estimator, compare the above two methods. In this paper, we introduce the notion of "Composite Reliablility" to estimate the reliability of nuclear-power plant EDG, and using practical examples, illustrate which method is more a, pp.opriate in our situation.situation.