Reliability-based design optimization of a superconducting magnetic energy storage system (SMES) utilizing reliability index approach

A reliability-based optimization method for electromagnetic design is presented to take uncertainties of design parameters into account. The method can provide an optimal design satisfying a specified confidence level in the presence of uncertain parameters. To achieve the goal, the reliability index approach based on the first-order reliability method is adopted to deal with probabilistic constraint functions and a double-loop optimization algorithm is implemented to obtain an optimum. The proposed method is applied to the TEAM Workshop Problem 22 and its accuracy and efficiency is verified with reference of Monte Carlo simulation results.