COMPARISION OF DESALINATION BY OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUES

SEAWAT is a generic MODFLOW/MT3DMS-based computer program designed to simulate three-dimensional variable-density groundwater flow coupled with multi-species solute and heat transport. The program has been used for a wide variety of groundwater studies including those focused on brine migration in continental aquifers as well as those focused on saltwater intrusion in coastal aquifers. SEAWAT uses the familiar structure of MODFLOW and MT3DMS. Thus, most of the commonly used pre and post-processors can be used to create SEAWAT datasets and visualize results. The MODFLOW concepts of “packages” and “processes” are retained in SEAWAT, which allows the program to work with many of the MODFLOW-related software programs, such as MODPATH, ZONEBUDGET, and parameter estimation programs. SEAWAT is a public domain computer program. The source code and software are distributed free of charge by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Seawater desalination plants have been utilized to supply fresh water to people, industries etc. in the world to fulfill their needs of pure water. Salination of water is a global problem that affects to countries all over the world and it causes a high environmental and economic cost, and poses a high risk to global health. This study is an attempt to identify the most suitable technology for the specific use by soliciting expert opinions desalination technologies. The selection process in this study was limited to seawater feed and five factors and three commercially available desalination technologies, i.e., multi-stage flash, vapor compression and reverse osmosis. In this paper we are using an extended grey relational analysis (GRA) method of multi criteria decision making (MCDM) to select appropriate optimum desalination technologies with interval-valued triangular fuzzy numbers and unknown information on criterion weights to select an optimum desalination technology.