DOEs come in a few flavours
Glen:DOEs come in a few flavours. The Classical stuff taught during
most Six Sigma training are the full and fractional designs used with either
continuous or discrete factors. An example is the paper helicopter
demonstration. Helicopters can be made with long/short wings, light/heavy
paper, long/short body, etc. These are the designs you can find in Minitab12. These
designs can also be found in Minitab14 under DOE->factorial.Minitab14 also allows mixture designs where all components
must total 100%. The example in the help menu shows this:The taste of lemonade depends only on the proportions of
lemon juice, sugar, and waterYou can also have an experiment that combines mixture
components with process variables. For example:The taste of a cake depends on the cooking time and
cooking temperature, and the proportions of cake mix ingredientsI have heard people mistakenly talk about the latter experiments
as mixture experiments because they have a mixture of two different types of
variables.It sounds like your setup has some variables that can be arbitrarily
fixed (like temperature) and some that must total 100% (like some additive to a
mixture). If this is the case, set up a mixture DOE with process
variables.If you have a component that must always be a fixed
percentage, then it does not vary and should not be included in the
experimental design at all. Cheers, BTDTP.S. If you have Minitab 12 you will have to upgrade to a
newer version to do mixture designs.
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