Mathews Malnar and Bailey, Inc. Quality engineering, applied statistical consulting, and training services for R&D, product, process, and manufacturing engineering organizations.

Design of Experiments

Note: This course can be modified in duration, format, and content to satisfy a customer's specific training requirements. The details below reflect the most common and successful design of the course.

Course Description:  This course begins with a review of the prerequisite material including graphical presentation methods, measures of location and variation, and the hypothesis tests and confidence intervals necessary to analyze and interpret designed experiments. Students will learn to design, analyze, and interpret experiments to study how a process output variable (POV) depends on one or more process input variables (PIV) using analysis of variance (ANOVA) and regression techniques. Students will learn to use both graphical and quantitative methods to confirm that the assumptions of the analysis methods are satisfied and appropriate remedial actions when they are not. The specific experiment designs to be covered are: the completely randomized design, the randomized block design, general factorial designs, two-level factorial designs, fractional factorial designs, Plackett-Burman designs, central composite designs, and Box-Behnken designs. Students will use the MINITAB statistical software package during clas. MINITAB and DOE skills will be reinforced with substantial homework assignments. Students will also be required to participate in lab exercises and to report the results of their experiments in both oral and written form.

Prerequisite: Students must have completed an applied statistics course or be able to demonstrate proficiency in basic statistical methods.

Textbook: Mathews, Design of Experiments with MINITAB, ASQ Quality Press. See the web page for the textbook for details of the book and supporting materials including class presentation notes, homework problems, and classroom exercises and labs.

Contact Hours: 36 to 40 hours. Students show better command and retention of the material if the course is delivered over an extended period of time such as in one four-hour session per week for ten weeks.

Homework: Six assignments requiring about 2-6 hours each (3 hours nominal) will be given. The customer may decide if students are required to do the homework although students’ post-course DOE skills are strongly and positively correlated to the amount of homework that they do.

Evaluation: Pre- and post-course quizzes will be used to document what students learned during the course.

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