Uniform design and its applications in chemistry and chemical engineering

Experimental designs are very important in chemometrics, since chemistry, until now, is still essentially a field of science strongly dependent on chemical experiments. So, for a long time, chemists have been trying to use the techniques of experimental design developed in statistics to improve experimental works. Three major methods of experimental design, such as factorial design including fractional factorial design and orthogonal design (OD), D-optimal design and uniform design (UD), and their applications in chemistry and chemical engineering are reviewed and compared. The features of uniform design are especially addressed. Uniformity of space filling is the most important and essential feature of the uniform design. Based on this feature, its cost-efficiency, robustness and flexibility make it very useful in the fields of chemistry and chemical engineering. Examples of successful applications of uniform design on improving technologies of various fields such as textile industry, pharmaceuticals, fermentation industry and others have been consistently reported in China since the 1980s. More recently, several various cases applying uniform design to chemical researches showed that the uniform design is indeed a very promising and powerful experimental design method.