Experimental Design for Formulation

Book excerpt: Many products, such as foods, personal-care products, beverages, and cleaning agents, are made by mixing ingredients together. This book describes a systematic methodology for formulating such products so that they perform according to one's goals, providing scientists and engineers with a fast track to the implementation of the methodology. Experimental Design for Formulation contains examples from a wide variety of fields and includes a discussion of how to design experiments for a mixture setting and how to fit and interpret models in a mixture setting. It also introduces process variables, the combining of mixture and nonmixture variables in a designed experiment, and the concept of collinearity and the possible problems that can result from its presence. Experimental Design for Formulation is a useful manual for the formulator and can also be used by a resident statistician to teach an in-house short course. Statistical proofs are largely absent, and the formulas that are presented are included to explain how the various software packages carry out the analysis. Many examples are given of output from statistical software packages, and the proper interpretation of computer output is emphasized. Other topics presented include a discussion of an effect in a mixture setting, the presentation of elementary optimization methods, and multiple-response optimization wherein one seeks to optimize more than one response.