Zinc oxide (ZnO) is one of the oxide semiconductor materials with excellent electrical, piezo-electrical and optical characteristics. It is widely used in many applications such as solar cells, gas sensors and field-emission displays. ZnO nanomaterials are also used in electronic, thermal and quantum devices, catalysis and wastewater disposal as adsorbents and photocatalysts.
For synthesis of ZnO nanoparticles, various techniques have been proposed and applied. Among them, the electrochemical synthesis method is widely used due to its simplicity, low-temperature operation, low energy consumption and great purity of synthesized products.
So Hyong Dok, a student at the Faculty of Material Science and Technology, has proposed a process optimization method, namely, TOPSIS-Taguchi method, for electrochemical synthesis of ZnO nanoparticles with respect to productivity and consumption using technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) and Taguchi methods. TOPSIS is used to convert multiple responses into a single integrated response (IR), and Taguchi method is used to design experiments and find optimal process parameters (PPs) by optimizing multiple responses.
He determined the optimal pH, concentration (CC), voltage (VL), and conductivity (CD) to maximize the productivity of ZnO nanoparticles and minimize the specific energy consumption and specific electrode consumption.
The optimal PPs were pH of 5, CC of 0.05 M, VL of 8V and CD of 30ms/cm, and their effect ranking on the IR was CC (37.657%), CD (32.498%), pH (15.614%) and VL (14.231%).
The proposed method could be widely used not only to electrochemical synthesis process optimization of ZnO nanoparticles but also to various materials fabrication process optimization problems.
For more information, please refer to his paper “Process optimization for electrochemical synthesis of ZnO nanoparticles with respect to productivity and consumption using TOPSIS and Taguchi methods” in “Scientific Reports” (SCI).