Application of Taguchi Method for The Synthesis of Nano-sized TiO2 Powders by Acid-Used Sol-Gel Method

Abstract

The acid-used sol-gel synthesis of nano-sized titania (TiO2) powders has been studied systematically to optimize the processing parameters by Taguchi method that control crystallite size. In addition, crystallite and particle size of TiO2 powders were examined by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). For this purpose, the amount of acid, reaction temperature and reaction time were determined as control parameters. In order to achieve these objectives, Taguchi's L9 orthogonal design (3 parameter, 3 level) was used for the experiential design. In order to determine the optimal synthesis conditions for nanosized TiO2 powders, the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio was used, which was calculated from crystallite size of the nano-sized TiO2 powders using "the-smaller-the-better" appoachment. Besides, analysis of variance (ANOVA) was utilised to accomplish the statistical importance of the synthesis parameters. Experiments were fulfilled to verify the model at the chosen conditions and the particle size was determined according to XRD analysis as 46.98 nm. Moreover, the actual size of the synthesised nano-sized TiO2 powders with the average size was 51.41 nm. Therefore, the Taguchi optimization method was a main tool in the optimization of the nanosized TiO2 powders synthesis process with less experiential tests and slightly cost-efficient approachment.

Synthesis and Characterization of Graphene Prepared from Rice Husk by a Simple Microwave Process

“…To determine parameters that are statistically significant analysis of variance (ANOVA) is performed. The ANOVA analyses and S/N ratio help to the prediction of the optimal combination of process parameters [24]. An ANOVA and an F-test are used to analyses the experimental data by using Eq.…”