Reliability Analysis of Electronic Systems on the Example of the New Radiation Tolerant Power Converter Controller for the Large Hadron Collider

At the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), several particle accelerators are operated in terms of research within the field of particle physics. To be able to operate the largest accelerator of all those, the circular Large Hadron Collider (LHC), magnetic fields are used to influence and accelerate the particles as intended. These magnetic fields are created by various power converters, each controlled by a specific Function Generator Controller (FGC). For the controller version which is used in the LHC (FGC2), a new version is currently being developed and is planned to be installed during 2017. This so-called «FGClite» will be deployed in radiation areas, where the FGC2 showed weaknesses in terms of performance due to radiation induced failure. In the framework of this work the electrical reliability of the FGClite is treated. An independent study was carried out regarding the radiation reliability [1], which is outside of the scope of this study. A comprehensive electrical reliability analysis, which tries to predict the failure rate and also to distinguish between potential failure modes, is presented in the following thesis. The main part of the thesis concerns a reliability prediction based on the US Military Standard, a Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) and a Fault Tree Analysis (FTA). The preliminary predicted failure rate which contains pessimistic safety values gets further expanded and specified upon by the FMEA and FTA. This allows a detailed prediction for the FGClite reliability and availability in the environment of its operation in the LHC to be made. The second part of this work, compares the FGClite predictions with real operational data from the FGC2. As a conclusion the predicted results are expanded, and a possible extrapolation to the performance of the FGClite is given.