Availability of Hydropressor Systems

Hydropressor systems are of paramount importance in keeping water supplies running properly. A typical such device consists of two (or more) identical electropumps operating alternately, so as to avoid downtime as much as possible. A first challenge was, considering a dual pump configuration, to identify the ideal usage proportion of each pump (from 0%-100%, meaning interchange only upon failure, to 50%-50%, where each pump works half the time) in order to improve availability, accounting solely for corrective maintenance. A second challenge, related to the first one, consisted of improving the availability of a single pump under the hazard of failure in three different ways (with their own occurrence frequencies), while accounting also for preventive maintenance. Each challenge was tackled through Monte-Carlo simulation and the models were implemented with the Python programming language. The results seem to indicate that significant improvements to standard industry practice can be made.