In the present work a reliability model for a typical solar heating and domestic hot water system is developed using the method of Fault Tree analysis. The reference system used in the present reliability modeling is a typical solar heating system whose heat transfer fluid is an anti-freeze liquid made of ethylene glycol. The system reliability structure has been identified with the aid of Fault Tree method. In addition, a computer program for the simulation of reliability analysis has been developed employing the Monte Carlo method.
In the computer simulation, failure rate data such as WASH-1400, MIL-HDBK-217B, and Green ＆ Bourne are used as an input data, and the results show that the reliability model developed in this work is capable of explaining the primary failure phenomena of the solar heating & domestic hot water system reasonably.
