Reliability estimation of auxiliary ventilation systems in long tunnels during construction

Ventilation system should blow large quantity of airflow particularly in case of toxic or explosive gasses emission from the wall rocks and face, especially in long tunnels. In these cases, multiple jet fans are usually required, so that they could be grouped together as serial, parallel or combined arrangements through ventilation system or equally spaced along the tunnel. There is a serious requirement to have some reserved jet fans along with the main once, so that the operation of the ventilation system could be reliable. Operation of a ventilation system is usually evaluated by experiences and engineering judgments which follow empirical methods. The aim of this paper is to introduce an approach to evaluate reliability of ventilation system in the long tunnels. The method is based upon using the failure rate time to determine the probability of the failure of an active jet fan and also the repair rate time to determine the probability of repairing the out of work ones.In this approach, the active and standby jet fans are modelled as a stochastic process. Therefore, the probability of replacing each failed jet fan with a standby jet fan is estimated using Markov Chains theory From this point of view a more realistic decision-making for the number of standby jet fans and also reducing the risk as well as uncertainties can be based upon the analysis of such a results. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.