Evaluation of aerobic/anaerobic industrial wastewater treatment processes: The application of multi‐criteria decision analysis

Abstract

Various technological methods are available for industrial wastewater treatment; from conventional to advanced treatment processes. Hence, it is a difficult task to select the most appropriate technology to treat industrial wastewater at a particular location. Many factors are involved in the decision‐making process, including capital, operation, and maintenance costs, as well as land requirement. The present work reports the results of the application of multiple‐attribute decision‐making (MADM) tool to industrial wastewater treatment plants operated under a hybrid aerobic/anaerobic biological process. At the first step, nine industrial wastewater treatment plants were evaluated and ranked by eight criteria using the Vikor method. Among the selected criteria, land requirements, energy consumption, and excess sludge production had the most pronounced effect on the decision‐making process. The results also indicated that the integration of upflow anaerobic fixed bed with intergraded fixed‐film activated sludge process could be used as the most appropriate treatment technology with a Vikor index of one. The result can provide wastewater treatment professionals and water agencies with an effective tool to choose the most appropriate hybrid process for industrial wastewater treatment plants. © 2019 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Environ Prog, 38:e13146, 2019

Wastewater treatment technology selection using a hybrid multicriteria decision‐making method

“…In the first level (Table 4), the economic and environmental aspects are given the highest importance (0.383 and 0.365, respectively) while the social aspect appears to be less important than the others, with the weight of 0.252. The substantial weight of the economic category in comparison with the other two dimensions was also confirmed by the studies conducted by Arroyo and Molinos-Senante (2018), Bottero et al (2011), Saghafi et al (2019), and Zhou et al (2018. The lack of transparency in the Iranian Government's policies regarding supporting investors (Groh and Wich, 2012), the high exchange rate of the dollar to the Iranian currency (Kia, 2008), the unprecedented decline in the oil price (Farzanegan and Markwardt, 2009) and the high inflation rate in Iran are considered to be the main factors explaining the high importance of the economic criteria in Iran.…”

“…Based on the results of the interviews, which are presented in Table 6, 10 of the 12 experts considered the economic criterion to be the most important criterion and the rest of them chose environmental factors; this outcome is consistent with the similarity of the scores for the economic and environmental criteria reported in this study. The superiority of the economic criterion over the social and environmental criteria in the Iranian industrial sector was also substantiated by Karimi et al (2011), Piadeh et al (2018), and Saghafi et al (2019. Among the subcriteria, the significance of the investment cost, energy consumption, and workforce requirement were approved by the experts, with 11, 10, and 10 votes, respectively (Table 6).…”

“…By employing the VIKOR (vlsekriterijumska optimizacija i kompromisno resenje) method, Saghafi et al. (2019) selected the most appropriate treatment technology for nine industrial WWT plants by considering eight criteria. They showed that, among all of the criteria, land requirement, energy consumption , and sludge production are of high importance.…”

A Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Approach to Evaluate Different UVC/H2O2 Systems in Wastewater Treatment

“…In this regard, the Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) technique is an approach recommended for situations of this kind, as it indicates the most adequate path among a set of alternatives based on criteria considered important for a specific type of analysis with both precision and scientific support [36]. Furthermore, the MCDM's ability to simultaneously deal with qualitative and quantitative data, including expert opinions, makes it a commonly applied technique by decision-makers [37], including in situations involving the choice of adequate wastewater treatment methods [38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47]. However, although these studies also focus on technology comparisons, their developments associated to AOP are rare [48,49].…”

Adsorption of hydrocarbon pollutants from wastewater using Cu‐ and Zn‐loaded activated carbon derived from waste tires

“…5 To remove the hydrocarbon pollutants before its discharge into the environment. 6,7 There are number of conventional wastewater treatment methods used based on biological 8 physical, and chemical processes. 9 As mentioned, refinery effluents contain suspended particles, grease, and oil fraction, which are reduced firstly through pretreatment techniques, like gravity separation in American petroleum institute (API) separator tank, and physiochemical by agglomeration followed by filtration and sedimentation.…”