Simulation of Electric Power Plant Performance Using Excel®-VBA

Abstract

This paper presents the failure and repair simulation for electric power house with N Turbo-alternator, where N may be up to 32. The program employs a pseudo-random number generator for individual power plant that can be described by exponential probability density functions. The resulting sequences of failure and repair events are then combined for the plants to give scenarios for different time horizons. The implementation in Excel®-VBA includes an appropriately designed userform containing the macro Active-X control for input of relevant information. The result shows that as the number of samples increased the behavior of the random events better represented the desired form with a correlation of almost 99% for 25 trials. This corresponds to a confidence interval of better than 95% and hence should be used as the median for practical applications. The results were tested and the distributions of the events were found to be close approximation of the target exponential distributions.