Reliability and Sensitivity Analysis of Low Power Portable Direct Methanol Fuel Cell

Direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) systems are becoming popular and one of the best candidate for powering portable devices. While the attempt to scale down for their size and improve their system topology and efficiency are underway, nevertheless literatures related to its reliability are limited. This might be due to the system infancy and low of market penetration. In this paper, reliability of low power DMFC system is evaluated by assuming as non-repairable components and system. System reliability block diagram (RBD) is developed and used to evaluate its reliability. By using RBD, failures can be considered as statistically independent. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis is evaluated in order to identify the critical components which severely affect the system reliability. The exponential distribution model is used to estimate failure rate and reliability of each component.