Research Article Artificial Neural Network Modelling of Photodegradation in Suspension of Manganese Doped Zinc Oxide Nanoparticles under Visible-Light Irradiation

Copyright © 2014 Yadollah Abdollahi et al. 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 artificial neural network (ANN) modeling of m-cresol photodegradation was carried out for determination of the optimum and importance values of the effective variables to achieve the maximum efficiency. The photodegradation was carried out in the suspension of synthesized manganese doped ZnO nanoparticles under visible-light irradiation. The input considered effective variables of the photodegradation were irradiation time, pH, photocatalyst amount, and concentration of m-cresol while the efficiency was the only response as output. The performed experiments were designed into three data sets such as training, testing, and validation that were randomly splitted by the software’s option. To obtain the optimum topologies, ANN was trained b