Ranking of thermal power plants focusing on air pollution: A Neutrosophic assessment

Abstract

This study aims to rank a number of thermal power plants (TPP) based on the emission rate of different air pollutants. It will encourage the managing director of the respective plant to make more attention to lower down the emission rate of pollutants. Since it is almost impossible to assess the emission of pollutants from a TPP on daily basis and as the rate of pollutant discharge from a particular TPP may vary under several grounds, so the emission rates of pollutants are characterised here as uncertain parameter. The discharge rate of air pollutant is assessed in three divided periods instead of taking a unique rate throughout the year to have a fair justification and is expressed by single valued triangular neutrosophic number (svtrn-number) to emphasise the hesitancy of experts independently in experimental data. The huge number of data of an svtrn-number is manipulated using graded mean integration concept. A methodology is developed to find the rank of plant by making a co-relation between its emission rate of air pollutants and the permissible norm specified by Pollution Control Board of the respective country. A TPP may have several number of power generation units with different capacity. So an importance is also given to each unit of a TPP in measurement of its overall emission rate. A user friendly algorithm is furnished to sketch the methodology and it is illustrated to find the rank of four coal fired power plants at different locations in India. The potentiality of the proposed methodology is claimed after comparing it with some of the existing literatures.