OPTIMAL WELDING PROCESS SELECTION TO FABRICATE CRUDE OIL FILTER TOWER JOINTS BY INTEGRATION OF MULTI CRITERIA DECISION MAKING PROCESSES
Author(s):
Kawakib A.K. Al- Mendwi* and Dr. Qasim M. Doos
Affiliation(s):
Mechanical Engineering Department, Baghdad University, Baghdad, Iraq
*Corresponding Author E-mail: [email protected]
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
The complexity in choosing a welding process stems from the large number of selection parameters that are often inter-dependent and contradictory in effect. This work integrated Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in to the extended PROMETHEE II to optimize the decision of selecting a welding process for crude oil tower joints with dissimilar materials and thicknesses. Four welding processes are chosen to select from, namely, Gas Metal Arc Welding (GMAW), Shielded Metal Arc Welding (SMAW), Submerged Arc Welding (SAW) and Flux Cord Arc Welding (FCAW). Twelve parameters are used to evaluate the selection of welding processes, namely, Design Application (DA), Welding Configuration (WC), Welding Weights (WW), Material Type (MTY), Material Thickness (MTH), Cost of Welding (CoW), Positional Welding Capability (PWC), Operator Factor (OF), Welding Quality (WQ), Filler Metal Utilization (FMU), Deposition Rate (DR), and Welding Procedures (WP). The analytical result showed that (FCAW) is the optimum welding process.