Design of Experiment

In order for industrial processes to yield predictable and desirable outcomes, they follow very specific, carefully balanced recipes. Sometimes, however, that recipe must be changed. Perhaps one of the ingredients is no longer available or is now produced by another supplier. Or a client might be asking for a tighter specification. Often, market forces shift the pricing of ingredients such that it becomes necessary to reduce one component to a minimum.

In order to find a modified or new process recipe that will reliably produce a product with the desired specifications, plants usually perform experiments to test various possible combinations. The most common way to choose the recipes to try out is to creatively “guess” at the likely options. Another is to systematically study the effect of each ingredient upon the result independently. Both of these ways usually require a large number of experiments, which are expensive, effortful, and time-consuming, and sometimes push the plant to the limits of what it can sensibly do. Even worse, none of these methods are guaranteed to yield the optimal, or even a satisfactory, result.

The Design of Experiment (DoE) service is algorithmica’s answer to this problem. The purpose of DoE is to produce a coherent plan for a small set of experiments that is guaranteed to yield the right recipe. We achieve this by purposefully testing certain combinations not in an attempt to stumble across the right one, but in order to discover the functional relationship between all the ingredients. This relationship is summarized in a formula that is used to calculate the right recipe.

algorithmica supplies the service of making custom experimental designs for your particular process, analyzing the results of the experiments, and then computing the optimal recipe. By choosing DoE for process tuning, you will achieve a better quality recipe, while at the same time saving money, effort, and time. Even better, any future adjustments to the same process can be done utilizing the achieved formula, thereby saving even more time, and always ensuring the best quality product.