Six Sigma Designed Experiments- Understand Your Materials and Processes while Minimizing Unneces-sary Testing

摘要

This paper will explain the benefits of using Six Sigma and Design of Experiment (DOE) to gain a better under-standing of materials and processes. It will focus on both optimization of materials to meet critical performance benchmarks and optimization of processes to improve consistency. Understanding the factors that play a role in a material’s performance is key to understanding a material. Do you want to know what factors (i.e. resins, reinforcements) will give you the lightest parts? Do you want to know which resin system will provide the strongest parts? These types of questions can be answered using designed experiments. This paper will explain the techniques to test the minimum quantity of samples to gain a well rounded understanding of your composite materials. You will see how variables (i.e. core material, rein-forcement type, and resin type) affect properties (i.e. strength) together, but independently have no impact. You will also learn that optimizing one property can sometimes worsen another property. Not only is it important to understand materials, it is also important to understand what factors influence a process. Examples: do room temperature and humidity affect cure time? Do the type of mold release or the number of parts that have been pulled off of a tool affect the cosmetic ap-pearance? This paper will show which variables in a process need to be controlled to achieve a desired output.