A Taguchi Approach for optimization of mass transfer coefficient in metronidazole drug delivery process and activated carbon as a carrier

Abstract

In recent years, new strategies have been developed on pharmacokinetics control, pharmacodynamics, undetermined toxicity, immunity, biophysics, and drug efficacy. These new strategies often called the drug delivery process. Activated carbon is a porous material that has a great character to be used for the drug delivery system. The current research, studying the effect of the number of parameters including particle size, the weight of drug to carrier, weight ratio, drug loading and temperature, time, and PH solution of mass transfer coefficient. The result of Taguchi program shows that the optimum point to give maximum loading efficiency was when the particle size of Nano activated carbon and the ratio of weight drug to AC weight has a value of 1.5 and maximum loading efficiency for metronidazole was 71% when the activated carbon was in macro particle size and 74% when the activated carbon was in nanoparticle size. The drug unloading process was obtained an optimum point that gives a better value of mass transfer coefficient in the first hour, 37°C and 1.5 PH solution for both metronidazole/macro.AC and metronidazole/nano.AC complexes