Question

Suppose that five different methods are used to refine an oil product. Each method may result in a different viscosity of the product. Each method is applied to one barrel of oil at a time which results in one batch of product. A company wants to use the method which results in the lowest viscosity, and they want to design an experiment to test this.

a) What are the experimental units in this experiment?

b) What are the treatments?

c) What is the response variable?

d) Suppose that 4 different plants use each of these 5 methods. Each plant is willing to be involved in the experiment. Each plant will produce 10 batches. Explain how the use of blocking should be incorporated into our experiment and how the randomization is to be done. (Give a simple table with the units at each plant labeled from 1 to 10.)

Answer 1

a)

The experimental units in this experiment are barrels of oil since the experiment will be conducted on them.

b)

The treatments are the different methods used to refine the oil product since changing the method of refining will change the viscosity of the product.

c)

The response variable is the viscosity of the oil product since it is the variable which helps us in identifying the best treatment to obtain the lowest viscosity of the final product.

d)

Here different blocks are the different plants since the unrefined oil product within each plant will be comparatively homogeneous than between different plants.Thus, we can assign 2 batches to each method within a plant to incorporate blocking.

Also, to incorporate randomization, we randomize as we generally do, for all the methods within a block/plant.

For example :

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