Probability of Failure Assessment in District Heating Network

The aim of this paper is to present works performed in HTC (Heat-Tech Center), Research & Development Centre of Veolia Group located in Warsaw regarding assessment of probability of failure in DHN (district heating network). This work is a part of a project dedicated to develop a software which objective is to increase reliability of DHN. The research methods consisted of three approaches. First, using database of failures which happened in Warsaw DHN and repairing protocols from past 10 years, a statistics approach was applied to perform first analysis. The result was that pipelines with nominal diameter DN (nominal diameter) ≤ 150 had higher failure rate per km, than pipelines with DN > 150. The next step of research was to study influence of internal (corrosion caused by heat carrier, quality of materials) and external (stray currents) factor in order to assess its individual influence on failure rate of pipe and explain reasons of differences in failure rate. To end a FMEA (failure mode and effects analysis) will aim to identify the main failures modes appearing on DHN, to estimate the main causes of these failures and to propose the best solutions regarding the causes, the costs and the means available.