Using designed experiments to improve the quality of concrete products

Concrete fence is one of the concrete products which is easy to be installed by the customers themselves. This product is produced from concrete mixture consisting of several component materials. While the product has been manufactured in various types and sizes, manufacturing process is not in stability or robustness. The concrete fence product has variability in quality characteristics, namely compressive strength and number of voids. Hence this research aims to determine the optimal operating conditions of the significant process factors influencing compressive strength and number of voids in the concrete fence product. Since this problem involves the simultaneous optimization of multi-response variables (the desirable combination of the responses of interest), a tool called ldquodesirabilityrdquo coupled with optimization algorithms of response surface methodology (RSM) achieves a specific target for the mean compressive strength and minimum voids based on predictive models.