Browsing by Keyword "Risk analysis"
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Item FMECA Assessment for Railway Safety-Critical Systems Investigating a New Risk Threshold Method(2021) Catelani, Marcantonio; Ciani, Lorenzo; Galar, Diego; Guidi, Giulia; Matucci, Serena; Patrizi, Gabriele; Tecnalia Research & InnovationThis paper develops a Failure Mode, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) for a heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system in railway. HVAC is a safety critical system which must ensure emergency ventilation in case of fire and in case of loss of primary ventilation functions. A study of the HVAC’s critical areas is mandatory to optimize its reliability and availability and consequently to guarantee a low operation and maintenance cost. The first part of the paper describes the FMECA which is performed and reported to highlight the main criticalities of the HVAC system under analysis. Secondly, the paper deals with the problem of the evaluation of a threshold risk value, which can distinguish negligible and critical failure modes. Literature barely considers the problem of an objective risk threshold estimation. Therefore, a new analytical method based on finite difference is introduced to find a univocal risk threshold value. The method is then tested on two Risk Priority Number datasets related to the same HVAC. The threshold obtained in both cases is a good tradeoff between the risk mitigation and the cost investment for the corrective actions required to mitigate the risk level. Finally, the threshold obtained with the proposed method is compared with the methods available in literature. The comparison shows that the proposed finite difference method is a well-structured technique, with a low computational cost. Furthermore, the proposed approach provides results in line with the literature, but it completely deletes the problem of subjectivity.Item Risk Assessment of a Wind Turbine: A New FMECA-Based Tool With RPN Threshold Estimation: A New FMECA-Based tool with RPN threshold estimation(2020) Catelani, Marcantonio; Ciani, Lorenzo; Galar, Diego; Patrizi, Gabriele; Tecnalia Research & InnovationA wind turbine is a complex system used to convert the kinetic energy of the wind into electrical energy. During the turbine design phase, a risk assessment is mandatory to reduce the machine downtime and the Operation & Maintenance cost and to ensure service continuity. This paper proposes a procedure based on Failure Modes, Effects, and Criticality Analysis to take into account every possible criticality that could lead to a turbine shutdown. Currently, a standard procedure to be applied for evaluation of the risk priority number threshold is still not available. Trying to fill this need, this paper proposes a new approach for the Risk Priority Number (RPN) prioritization based on a statistical analysis and compares the proposed method with the only three quantitative prioritization techniques found in literature. The proposed procedure was applied to the electrical and electronic components included in a Spanish 2 MW on-shore wind turbine.