User's guide for the UNIRAM availability assessment methodology: Version 1. 1

This User's Guide is intended to accompany Version 1.1 of a computer software package, UNIRAM, that is used for performing reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM) analyses of power generation systems. The UNIRAM package was developed as a means of implementing the availability assessment methodology presented in EPRI Report AP-2202, Guide for the Assessment of the Availability of Gasification-Combined-Cycle Power Plants. The outputs of the program include predictions of plant availability, equivalent availability, forced outage rate, equivalent forced outage rate, and other performance measures. This guide presents the steps needed to develop a model of a power production system for use with the UNIRAM software. These steps include developing availability block diagrams, subsystems, and subsystem fault trees to represent the unit being studied. The guide also explains the use of the UNIRAM pre-processor program in creating and manipulating input data files. It describes the nine execution options available to the UNIRAM user and presents an example output of each run type. The appendixes to this guide contain complete documentation of the UNIRAM software package, including the loading and execution procedures required for using the programs.