Exercise 2

An experimental study of a process for manufacturing carbon-steel springs was designed to

identify process operating conditions that will minimize or possibly eliminate the cracks that
have plagued the manufactured springs. From physics, material science, and process
knowledge, the following factors and levels were chosen for the investigation. The response
of interest, y, is the proportion (in %) of the manufactured batch of springs that do not
crack.

The result of the study is shown in the data table below.

a) What experimental design has been used in the study?

b) What precautions would you have taken while doing the experiments?
c) Comment on any shortcomings of the above experimental design.
d) If you were in charge of this unit that manufactures the springs, what would your strategy
be? Support your answer with as much quantitative calculations and analysis as possible.

Answer:

a) A 23 factorial design experiment is conducted for the study

b) The experiment is conducted at a very high temperature condition, the testing equipment
used must be able to sustain high temperature condition in order to prevent any mishaps
during the conduct of the experiment, PPE must be donned at all times during the conduct
of experiment along with risk assessment and job hazard analysis are performed before the
start of the experiment. The question can be asked whether that the experiment was
conducted in a randomized manner. Whether the experiment was conducted following the
standard operating procedure using the same equipment and ingredients.

c) Wider range of steel with higher carbon content should be chosen in order to obtain
more experimental data in order to select other variety of steel which might produce better
springs with lower costs. Instead of using quench oil, better to substitute with other safer
quenching medium such as water since oil is a flammable material which might cause major
hazard when exposed to sudden temperature change due to high temperature steel.
Replication is not done for this experiment as the value y given is only one for each
experiment run which causes the credibility of the experiment.

d) From the run test conducted by using MatLab, the Y= 71.25 +11.5 x1- 2.5 x2 + 5 x1.x3
with R-squared value at 0.993 and R-squared adjusted at 0.987 which we can conclude that
the model proposed is acceptable. The experiment should be conducted at high
temperature which is at 1600 degree with lower carbon content steel which is at 0.5% and
also using higher quench oil temperature which is at 120 degree Fahrenheit in order to
produce higher yield of springs with no cracks. By using Excel optimization method, we can
get the maximum yield of about 91 if we follow the recommended parameters to run the
experiment.

Exercise 3

A 23 factorial design has been run in duplicate for the purposes of studying in a research
laboratory the effects of three variables (temperature, concentration and time) on the
amount of a certain metal recovered from an ore sample of a given weight. The data is
available in Table E3. Analyze these data and state the practical conclusions you reach.

 Determine if the data collected above has any discrepant value.

 Perform an analysis using all of the data and perform the required diagnostics.
 Repeat the analysis omitting the discrepant value.
 Report your findings.
Answer:
a) There is a discrepant value for the experimental data which is the experiment that is
conducted at 1600 degree with 30% concentration within 1 hour for the first and second run
which has response of 80 and 62 which are very unbalanced meanwhile for other set of
experiment yields similar response. The discrepant value observed is the response of 80
from the 1st set of data as we can see from the data trend, the trend for response should be
an increasing trend so we can conclude that 80 is discrepant value.

b) From the result generated by MatLab, the y = 79.125 + 4.125 x2 + 8.375 x3 which R-
squared value is at 0.92 and adjusted R-squared value at 0.89 which is still acceptable.
According to the diagnostic, the experiment should be conducted at high concentration
which is 35% for 3 hours meanwhile the temperature does not affect the response rate.

c) From the result generated by MathLab when we eliminate the discrepant value, the y
value given becomes y = 78+1.75 x1 + 5.25 x2 + 9.5x3 which R-squared value becomes 0.99
and adjusted R-squared becomes 0.98. From the results given, we can see significant
increase in the R-squared which proves that the conclusion that we draw in the earlier part
of the answer is correct.

d) The temperature does affect the overall response rate of the metal when we remove the
discrepant value in the experimental data to give the highest R-squared value. So
sometimes we must not blindly take every single data in the experiment because there are
many factors that might cause some outlier data that will affect the model analysis and the
conclusion drawn.