BENEFITS OF EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN

Experimental Designs (ED) enables industrial engineers to study the effects of several variables affecting the response or output of a certain process. Experimental Designs (ED) methods have wide potential application in the engineering design and development stages. It is the strategy of the management in today's competitive world market to develop products and processes insensitive to various sources of variation using ED. The potential applications of Experimental Designs (ED) in industries are:

• reducing product and process design and development time;
• studying the behaviour of a process over a wide range of operating conditions; minimising the effect of variations in manufacturing conditions;
• understanding the process under study and thereby improving its performance;
• increasing process productivity by reducing scrap, rework etc.;
• improving the process yield and stability of an on-going manufacturing process;
• making products insensitive to environmental variations such as relative humidity, vibration, shock and so on;
• studying the relationship between a set of independent process variables (i.e., process parameters) and the output (i.e., response).

EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN (ED)

Experimental Designs (ED) is a strategy of planning, conducting, analysing and interpreting experiments so that sound and valid conclusions can be drawn efficiently, effectively and economically. It provides the experimenters a greater understanding and power over the experimental process. ED has seen an increased application over fifteen years, as both manufacturing and service industries have attempted to refine and improve product, process and service quality.

Experimental design (ED) is a powerful technique for understanding a process, studying the impact of potential variables or factors affecting the process and thereby providing spontaneous insight for continuous quality improvement possibilities. ED has proved to be very effective for improving the process yield, process capability, process performance and reducing process variability. However research has shown that the application of this powerful technique by the engineering fraternity in manufacturing companies is limited due to lack of skills and expertise in manufacturing, lack of statistical knowledge required by industrial engineers and so on. Some of the recent research findings on the problems and gaps in the state-of-the-art in ED. In order to bridge the gap in the statistical knowledge required by engineers, the article presents a paper helicopter experiment which can be easily carried out in a class-room to teach experimental design techniques. The results of the experiment have provided a greater stimulus for the wider application of ED by industrial engineers in real-life situations for tackling quality problems.