An availability evaluation method for desalination process with three-state equipment under a specific repair queuing policy.

Oil waste is one of the most important pollutants in the oil and gas industry. Since the oil owing in the wells contains significant amount of saltwater, the effluent amount rises upon increasing the oil reservoir extraction. Separating the saltwater from the extracted oil before starting the refinery process plays an essential role in reducing the oil costs and benefiting from the transfer capacity as well. This paper presents a new Chapman-Kolmogorov Equation-Based (CKEB) method to evaluate the availability of a desalination system with three-state equipment and weighted-k-out-of-n configuration. In this system, the equipment is repairable, and each repair facility can repair all equipment types of different sub-systems (pump stations). All failures and repairs were considered to have a constant rate (with exponential distribution) and use the Chapman-Kolmogorov equations to drive the system availability. Then, the presented method was validated using a simulation technique. Finally, the elapsed times of solving both techniques were calculated and compared. The results confirmed the superiority of the CKEB technique in terms of computational time. Compared with the simulation technique, the computational time ratio for the CKEB method was in the range of 0:0002%0:0058% for the small-size problems, 0:05%0:94% for the medium-size problems, and 1.31%-5.39% for the large-size problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]