Nowadays, zinc oxide (ZnO) has attracted attention in research and development because of its remarkable antibacterial properties. Chitosan/ZnO nanoparticles were successfully synthesized via microwave heating. The objectives of this work were to investigate the effect of stabilizer, power heating and time heating on size of chitosan/ZnO nanoparticles and to determine antibacterial activity against pathogenic bacteria, where chitosan was used as a stabilizing agent. Chitosan/ZnO nanoparticles were analyzed by Fourier Transform Infra Red (FTIR), X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FESEM), and Zetasizer instrument. The power heating and time heating were varied from 400 to 800 Watt and 4 to 8 minutes, respectively. The presence of chitosan has role on preventing the nanoparticles from agglomeration by producing a milky solution of chitosan/ZnO nanoparticles without any suspensions. The increase of power and time heating improved the size of nanoparticles. The peak in FTIR spectrum at around 427 cm -1 was confirmed the existence of the ZnO phase. XRD patterns showed that the chitosan/ZnO nanoparticles materials were pure phase with average crystalline size is 130 nm. FESEM revealed that chitosan/ZnO nanoparticles were uniformly distributed with the mean value of size is 70 nm and spherical shaped. Further impact of power and time heating on the size of the chitosan/ZnO nanoparticles can be shown by a nanoparticles size distribution with the average of 30 to 90 nm. The results showed that chitosan/ZnO nanoparticles have displayed an antibacterial inhibition zone against Gram-positive S. aureus and Gram-negative E. coli which 16.0 and 13.3 mm, respectively. Chitosan/ZnO nanoparticles were synthesized in this work presented have potential application to prevent bacterial infections.
The tropical white peppercorns are common commodity crops which have been traditionally used for the treatment of many free radical-related diseases. These medicinal properties are due to the presence of natural antioxidants. This study investigated the combination of microwave extraction parameters for the recovery of natural antioxidants from the white pepper matrix. Microwave-assisted technique was used for the extraction of bioactive oleoresin from white pepper. Taguchi experimental design was employed to investigate the combination of independent extraction parameters for optimal recovery of natural antioxidants. The feed backpropagation artificial neural network model was thereafter applied to optimally predict the result for the different combination of operating parameters. This was achieved by evaluating different algorithms, transfer functions, and neurons. The result obtained from the orthogonal parametric study gave an optimal antioxidant activity of 91.02% at irradiation time of 120 min, microwave power level of 350 W, particle size of 0.300 mm, and liquid-to-solid ratio of 6 mL/g. The gradient descent (GD) algorithm, tansigmoid transfer function, and 4-x-3 topology were used to model the experimental data. A better prediction was then obtained with an overall coefficient (R) and mean square error (MSE) of 0.9595 and 1.4381, respectively. In this study, the feedforward backpropagation neural network was successfully applied to optimally evaluate the complex relationship between the input extraction parameters and the response.
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