Teaching the Design of Experiment and Response Surface Methodology Using Paper Helicopter Experiment

Design of Experiment is one of the powerful tools with great capability in improving experiments performance. DOE is a powerful Quality Engineering tool that can help managers and engineers to identify main variables which affecting the performance. Response Surface Methodology is also used to determine the input combination of factors which maximize or minimize the objective function. There is a cognitive gap between the knowledge of statistics required by engineers due to lack of education and skills. The main goal of this paper is teaching the combination of DOE (one-half fractional factorial) and response surface methodology to optimize the process performance. For simplicity the paper helicopter is selected as a case study which is quite old and has been widely applied by many statisticians for teaching purpose. The experiment was conducted to optimize the paper helicopter flight time. To achieve this aim the one-half fractional factorial and response surface methodology was adopted to investigate the effect of factors and the interactions between them by considering the minimum number of trials.