Application of House of Quality in assessment of seawater pretreatment technologies

Abstract

Increasing pressure on water resources is leading to a growing reliance on seawater desalination for the provision of freshwater. Pretreatment of seawater is a major step in seawater desalination, which can mitigate problems with reverse osmosis (RO) membranes. No clearly superior pretreatment technology exists, due to the variation in input water quality, and furthermore, the pretreatment must be designed to be functional with input water quality characteristics that vary considerably over time.The objective of this work is to conduct technology assessment by applying a lissome version of HOQ matrix developed in a case study of dissolved air flotation (DAF) system, which is used as water pretreatment for RO desalination systems. The DAF system technology is compared with other pretreatment processes such as ultrafiltration, sedimentation, and granular media filtration. General analysis provides insight to decision makers to help them improve technologies so that they could meet specific demands. HOQ offers a comparative analysis and identifies specific characteristics that must be improved to develop the chosen technology.The HOQ provides a comprehensive analysis for decision making in management, showing that no pretreatment technologies present a superior performance vis-a-vis all customer attributes, however, it identifies the features of the system, to which efforts should be funneled. For DAF system, these are: water quality changes and energy consumption.