Mission Reliability Modeling of Antenna Array Subsystem in Active Phased Array Radar

ABSTRACT In this paper, a probabilistic analytical reliability model is proposed for predicting the mission reliability of antenna array subsystem in active phased array radar. The functional dependent failure correlation among units is analyzed and associated with the array panel power modules, T/R modules and antenna elements. The reliability modeling is conducted by calculating the conditional probability based on failure levels of the corresponding modules. The traditional reliability evaluation model is also established based on voting redundancy structure. The results show that the traditional method overestimates the system reliability and the relative error is more than 30% at t = 2000 h. In the proposed model, the predicted reliability curves become steeper with the increase of design parameter m and generally intersect at one point near by the usage time t = 2000 h. The reliability curves of T/R module show greater fluctuations than those of array panel power module for different failure rate data, while it shows almost no data fluctuations for antenna element. In the single‐factor and two‐factor variable modes, the predicted results using the proposed model also present that the T/R module could be a dominant factor for improving the system reliability.