Locating Water Desalination Facilities for Municip

Authors: M Habibi Davijani A Nadjafzadeh Anvar M E Banihabib

Publish Date: 2014/05/31

Volume: 28, Issue: 10, Pages: 3341-3353

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Abstract

Groundwater resources have become the main resources for water supply due to the unavailability of surface water in arid zones Arid zone’s damage to groundwater resources will have a high impact on human life in arid zones comparing to other regions Due to the lack of surface water resources in these arid zones groundwater is used as a resource for drinking and sanitation purposes due to the lack of surface water resources in these arid zones Water desalination facilities are set up in locations where there is both sufficient amount of water quantitative criteria and the extracted water has adequate quality qualitative criteria Therefore an optimization model should be used to locate optimal places for water desalination facilities Multicriteria decisionmaking models are mathematical techniques that by using the geographic information system are able to evaluate the options under complicated and indefinite geographic conditions This research prepares information and factor maps to assign weights to qualitative water maps which were combined in the form of an inductive network Therefore by employing the concept of fuzzy fusion models this article presents a method for solving multicriteria geographicallyindeterminate problems and finally finds an appropriate location for the construction of a water desalination system in the desert region of Birjand in IranAccess to clean and safe water is fast becoming a major problem throughout the world Presently about 12 billion people around the world don’t have access to adequate amounts of clean water World Health Organization 2009 Many people encounter water shortages during hot seasons The current population growth rate and increase of the earth’s surface temperature is causing the problem of access to safe and clean water for drinking and sanitation to become considerably worse United Nations World Water 2009Also groundwater salinization occurs in some some aquifers around the world Benavente et al 2004 Barlow 2003 In this context many studies have been conducted with groundwater contamination sources such as deep brines or upward flow from deep saline water Vengosh et al 1999 downward leakage from surficial saline water through failed or improperly constructed Aunay et al 2006 fossil seawater Yamanaka and Kumagai 2006 Impact of land disposal of reject brine from desalination plants on soil and groundwater Mohameda et al 2005 evaporite dissolution PulidoLeboeuf et al 2003 or present seawater intrusion often due to excessive pumping Kim et al 2003Due to the poor and inadequate potential of surface waters optimal planning management and utilization schemes should be implemented in order to supply the needed water from the limited potential of groundwater aquifers Edet 1993 Gallardo et al 2005 Partey et al 2010 Bohlke 2002 Celik and Yildirim 2006 Robins 2001 Gallardo and Tase 2005 Mishra et al 2005 Edmunds et al 2003 Considering these conditions one of the primary means of acquiring clean and safe drinking water in the desert regions is the use of water desalination facilities The locations and types of these facilities should be selected based on the aquifers’ quality limitations with respect to salinity heavy metals water hardness and the requirements associated with the improvement of obtained water quality Aiuppa et al 2003 Barker et al 1998 SanchesMartos et al 2001 Van Vliet and Zwolsman 2008Among a total number of 145 national water desalination units surveyed in towns and villages 128 units 883  with total daily production capacity of 53317 m3 are located in towns and the rest of those with daily production capacity of 6170 m3 are located in rural regions The water quality achieved by the water desalination units is a mixture of calcic chloritic sulfates and the efficiency of these systems in reducing the water’s TDS is 987  Ghanad 2005 Masoomi et al 2011Sophocleous et al 1982 performed a geostatistical analysis on water levels in places where the studied wells were located along the same line and at equal distances from one another and they observed a strong positional correlation between water levels in the wells They also prepared counter lines maps of groundwater and presented a network for the management of these waters Sophocleous et al 1982 Similarly in a research on the distribution of nitrate concentration in groundwater using the multivariable statistical analysis method Raiber et al 2012 found out that petrologically the composition of bedrock has a significant effect on the concentration of nitrate and concluded that this method can be employed for the analysis of hydrogeological and hydrogeochemical data obtained from studies to locate the spread of water contamination and that acceptable solutions can be achieved through this approach Raiber et al 2012 Güler et al 2012 used the fuzzy clustering multivariate statistics and GIS methods and by means of the hydrological and hydrochemical data on groundwater they could discover the impacts of human activities on these resources These investigators claimed that human activities have the most devastating impact on the contamination of the studied region Carter and Graeme 1994 Güler et al 2012As previously mentioned the use of desalination facilities to remove the salt and purify the groundwater to a drinkable level can be a viable solution to the shortage of safe drinkable water and lack of access to suitable surface waters in arid zones Previous research has not paid special attention to locating water desalination facilities to provide municipal drinking water

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