Sustainable oil selection for cleaner production in Indian foundry industries: A three phase integrated decision-making framework

Abstract

Oil in casting industries is one of the major sources of environmental pollution as its burning directly results in the emission of toxic gases such as carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), sulphur dioxide (SO2) and suspended particulate matters (SPM). The aim of this work is to select the best sustainable oil for a cleaner and environment friendly production system in small scale casting industries of Agra city located in India. Performance, quality and cost are considered as the most influential parameters, while jatropha, vegetable oil, karanja oil and light diesel oil are considered as the alternatives. A novel integrated three phase decision-making framework is proposed, encompassing fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP), fuzzy technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (FTOPSIS) and fuzzy evaluation based on distance from average solution (FEDAS) methods. FAHP is implemented for computing weights of the considered criteria and sub-criteria. These weights are subsequently used in FTOPSIS and FEDAS methods to derive ranking of the considered oils. Light diesel oil emerges out as the best oil under the considered criteria with the highest closeness coefficient (0.9807) and appraisal score (0.6683) values. For validating the results of the proposed decision framework, sensitivity analysis (SA) has been performed. From the twelve experiments of SA, it is observed that light diesel oil retained its highest score in nine experiments which substantiate its top priority as well as FTOPSIS and FEDAS-based results.