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Develop a new method to reliability determination of a solar array mechanism via universal generating function

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Abstract

Reliability analysis is very important in a practical engineering system. As these systems in space industry such as spacecraft and satellite are used to increase analysis accuracy, the system should be modeled carefully. Since the systems can impress the mission succession. In the real world, usually systems have multilevel performance and components have multimode failures. But often the binary-state model is used to determination of the reliability of the system. Although, the binary-state is simple and useful, so it cannot capture real states of a system. Therefore, calculation accuracy is decreased and mission risk is increased. Especially, if functions and operations in a mission or a system have a dependency, for example, the operations sequentially were occurred. The solar array mechanism is an important sub-system in a satellite, since if this system is failed, power generation may be stopped and satellite is failed. In this paper, a new method is proposed to model and assess reliability via the Universal generating function (UGF) for a solar array mechanism. The capability of this model for evaluation and determination of the reliability of the solar array mechanism as the multi-state system is shown, that subsystems/components work in a logical order or sequence. In comparison to Boolean algebra and crude Monte Carlo methods, the accuracy of this method is acceptable.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Aerospace Research Institute, Ministry of Science, Research and Technology, Tehran, Iran

    Mohammad Ali Farsi

Authors
  1. Mohammad Ali Farsi
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Correspondence to Mohammad Ali Farsi.

Additional information

Recommended by Associate Editor Byeng Dong Youn

Mohammad Ali Farsi received the B.E., M.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 1999, 2002, and 2008, respectively. He joined Aero Space Inst. (Ministry of science, Research and Technology) in 2006 and he is currently an Asso. Professor. His main areas of research interest are Reliability, System Engineering and Space device design.

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Farsi, M.A. Develop a new method to reliability determination of a solar array mechanism via universal generating function. J Mech Sci Technol 31, 1763–1771 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12206-017-0324-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12206-017-0324-9

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