Water Desalination Plants Performance Using Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Making

Countries which do not have adequate supply of freshwater sources like Kuwait resort to using desalination plants to meet their demand. Kuwait had used Multi-flash desalination (MSF) plants sine the 50’s of the last century to satisfy its ever increasing demand. Many new and more efficient and cost effective desalination technologies are currently available. Kuwait is in the process of building new desalination plants, and has to seize this opportunity to consider using other desalination technologies instead of MSF plants. In this work, an attempt to make to bring to the attention to the decision maker the performance and suitability of the different technologies using a fuzzy multi-criteria decision making technique. The preference is based on six criteria (factors) for comparing three commercially available desalination technologies, i.e., Multi-stage flash (MSF), Multi-effect desalination (MED), and Reverse osmosis (RO). The study found that the amount of energy used in these plants should be most important selection criteria followed by the amount of pre-treatment required. The most preferred technology is RO according to this study. Key-Words: Freshwater, Decision maker, Preference, Reverse osmosis, Multi-stage flash, Multi-effect desalination