Reliability evaluation of the pumped-storage plants using Markov process

Nowadays, the evaluation of reliability and availability is one of the most important criteria in all engineering sciences .Due to the increasing of dependency of the life into the electrical energy, the availability of power system is very important for consumers. To achieve this issue, each of the main components of the power system must have adequate reliability. In this paper, reliability evaluation of the pumped storage plants using Markov process is carried out. For this purpose, at first an overview of the structure and the usage of the pumped storage plants is presented. Then, the main concepts of the Markov process model are reviewed and the appropriate model for reliability evaluation of a pumped storage plant is presented. Using the presented model and according to existing equipment, various indicators of reliability and also the possibilities of failure mode, full and half capacity of the plant are reported and sensitivity analysis is carried out to evaluate the effect of repair and failure rates of equipments on reliability of the plant.