A decision making methodology for material selection in sugar industry using hybrid MCDM techniques

Corrosion and wear contributes a major role for frequent failures of pipes in sugar industry. The selection of suitable material is mandatory to overcome the aforementioned problems. This paper describes an application of multi criteria decision making (MCDM) technique for selection of suitable material for pipes to reduce the corrosive wear in sugar industry. The proposed MCDM technique involves fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) integrated with technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) and VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (in Serbian) (VIKOR) techniques. FAHP is used to determine the criteria weights, whereas TOPSIS and VIKOR used to find the performance ranking of the alternative materials. This study focuses on five stainless steel grades such as J4, JSLAUS, J204Cu, 409M, 304 and seven evaluation criteria such as yield strength, ultimate tensile strength, percentage of elongation, hardness, cost, corrosion rate and wear rate to select the appropriate material.