QUALITY IMPROVEMENT IN MULTIRESPONSE EXPERIMENTS THROUGH ROBUST DESIGN METHODOLOGY

Robust design methodology aims at reducing the variability in the product performance in the presence of noise factors. Experiments involving simultaneous optimization of more than one quality characteristic are known as multiresponse experiments which are used in the development and improvement of industrial processes and products. In this paper, robust design methodology is applied to optimize the process parameters during a particular operation of rotary driving shaft manufacturing process. The three important quality characteristics of the shaft considered here are of type Nominal-the-best, Smaller-the-better and Fraction defective. Simultaneous optimization of these responses is carried out by identifying the control parameters and conducting the experimentation using L9 orthogonal array