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

The acid-used sol-gel synthesis of nano-sized titania (TiO 2 ) powders has been studied systematically to optimize the processing parameters by Taguchi method that control crystallite size. In addition, crystallite and particle size of TiO 2 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 L 9 orthogonal design (3 parameter, 3 level) was used for the experiential design. Optimal synthesis conditions were described by use of the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio which was calculated from crystallite size of the nano-sized TiO 2 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 TiO 2 powders with the average size of 51.41 nm. Therefore, the Taguchi optimization method was an main tool in the optimisation of the nanosized TiO 2 powders synthesis process with less experiential tests and slightly cost-efficient approachment.