Specific Surface Area Characterization of Spinel Ferrite Nanostructure Based Compounds for Photocatalysis and Other Applications Using Extreme Learning Machine Method

Nanocrystalline spinel ferrite based compounds are technological driven materials with interesting potentials in photocatalysis for renewable energy generation, gas sensing for pollution control, magnetic drug delivery, rod antennas, storage media (high density) and supercapacitive materials, among others. Specific surface area of spinel ferrite based compounds contributes immensely to the application of this semiconductor in industrial domains. Experimental determination of specific surface area is laborious and costly and consumes appreciable time. Compositional substitutions in crystal structure effectively improve physical properties and enhance specific surface area through alteration of moment distribution between tetrahedral oxygen sites and octahedral coordination. With the aid of distorted lattice parameters due to compositional substitution and the spinel ferrite nanocrystallite size as model descriptors, this present work models the specific surface area of spinel ferrite nanomaterial through extreme learning machine (ELM) based intelligent modeling method. The developed sigmoid activation function-based ELM (S-ELM) model shows superior performance over genetic algorithm based support vector regression (GBSVR) and stepwise regression (STWR) models existing in the literature with performance improvement of 61.31% and 70.01%, respectively, using root mean square error performance metric. The significances of cobalt and lanthanum compositional substitution on the specific surface area of spinel ferrite nanomaterials were investigated using S-ELM model. Ease of implementation of S-ELM model as compared with the existing GBSVR model, coupled with the demonstrated improved performance and persistent closeness of its predictions with the experimental values, would be highly meritorious for quick and precise characterization of specific surface area of spinel ferrite nanomaterials for various desired applications.