Assessment of the Intake and the Pretreatment Design in Existing Seawater Reverse Osmosis (SWRO) Plants by Hasse Diagram Technique (HDT)

Abstract

Seawater desalination is a rising technology intended to overcome water scarcity and is increasingly being used for the production of drinking water. A good quality pretreatment process is prominent to the successful operation of a Seawater Reverse Osmosis (SWRO) plant. The tasks of the intake and the pretreatment modules are to prevent fouling and to extend the lifetime of the reverse osmosis membranes. To practice the method of assessment design, 19 seawater plants with 11 different design strategies have been evaluated. The assessed strategies consist of: (i) Intake treatment, (ii) pretreatment aid (coagulation, flocculation, clarification), and (iii) pretreatment unit. Every possible combination of the design elements has been evaluated by a set of 15 attributes. The comparative evaluation has been conducted by Hasse diagram technique (HDT) using PyHasse software. The result of the HDT application includes 7 favorable incomparable design strategies. In order to solve the incomparability, the Condorcet-Kemeny-Young-Levenglick (C-K-Y-L) ranking procedure was additionally used and rendered the optimal design that is based on subsurface intake and membrane (ultrafiltration) pretreatment facilities. According to the results, both mathematical methods, i.e., the HDT in combination with the C-K-Y-L, procedure can be powerful and helpful tools to assist decisions concerning design strategies.

Indicator Analyses: What Is Important—and for What?

“…In the present context we shall not describe the principles of partial order theory as this can be found in numerous publications previously published (Al-Sharrah 2010 ; Annoni and Brüggemann 2008 ;Bick et al 2011 ;Brüggemann and Voigt 2008 ;Brüggemann andPatil 2010 , 2011 ;Brüggemann and Carlsen 2006 ;Brüggemann 2011 ;Duchowicz et al 2008 ;Freier et al 2011 ;Kardaetz et al 2008 ;Newlin and Patil 2010 ;Restrepo et al 2008 ;Tsakovski and Simeonov 2011 ;Voigt and Brüggemann 2008 ).…”

Partial order methodology: a valuable tool in chemometrics

“…Calculations are based on the PyHasse software (developed and currently being extended and improved by the second author of this paper). The basic principles of partial order theory shall not be presented here as this can be found in numerous previously published papers [16][17][18][19]3,[20][21][22][23]. Thus, we shall only briefly mention the fundamentals.…”

On the influence of data noise and uncertainty on ordering of objects, described by a multi‐indicator system. A set of pesticides as an exemplary case

“…HDs are unique visualizations of the order relations because of eq. (1) (causing a partially ordered set (poset)) and are a rather convenient tool when the set of objects is not too large [1,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. For larger datasets the various partial ordering tools are all still applicable.…”