The Impact of Safety Mitigation to Reliability of Co-Generation Units

Companies may be considering improving their power reliability by installing one or more new co-generating unit(s) in addition to buying power. However, they may be unaware that the safety devices that protect the unit(s) may also inadvertently shutdown the unit(s). This paper first describes how a co-generation unit operates and some of its safety features. One of the safety features is to shutdown the unit when a temperature is inadvertently high. However, the number of instruments used to measure a temperature greatly impacts both safety and reliability. This paper graphically shows the simultaneous impact of four types of voting to both safety and reliability and discusses the purpose of each one. Knowing the purpose of each type of voting can lead to selecting a co-generation unit that matches a users needs. This paper also shows how the values in the graph are calculated.