Basic Experimental Strategies And Data Analysis For Science And Engineering

Every technical investigation involving trial-and-error experimentation embodies a strategy for deciding what experiments to perform, when to quit, and how to interpret the data. This handbook presents several statistically derived strategies which are more efficient than any intuitive approach and will get the investigator to their goal with the fewest experiments, give the greatest degree of reliability to their conclusions, and keep the risk of overlooking something of practical importance to a minimum. Features: Provides a comprehensive desk reference on experimental design that will be useful to practitioners without extensive statistical knowledge Features a review of the necessary statistical prerequisites Presents a set of tables that allow readers to quickly access various experimental designs Includes a roadmap for where and when to use various experimental design strategies Shows compelling examples of each method discussed Illustrates how to reproduce results using several popular software packages on a companion web site Following the outlines and examples in this book should quickly allow a working professional or student to select the appropriate experimental design for a research problem at hand, follow the design to conduct the experiments, and analyze and interpret the resulting data. John Lawson and John Erjavec have a combined 25 years of industrial experience and over 40 years of academic experience. They have taught this material to numerous practicing engineers and scientists as well as undergraduate and graduate students.

An overview of experimental methods providing practical advice to students seeking guidance with their experimental work.

Emphasizes the strategy of experimentation, data analysis, and the interpretation of experimental results. Features numerous examples using actual engineering and scientific studies. Presents statistics as an integral component of experimentation from the planning stage to the presentation of the conclusions. Deep and concentrated experimental design coverage, with equivalent but separate emphasis on the analysis of data from the various designs. Topics can be implemented by practitioners and do not require a high level of training in statistics. New edition includes new and updated material and computer output.

Data Analysis for Scientists and Engineers is a modern, graduate-level text on data analysis techniques for physical science and engineering students as well as working scientists and engineers. Edward Robinson emphasizes the principles behind various techniques so that practitioners can adapt them to their own problems, or develop new techniques when necessary. Robinson divides the book into three sections. The first section covers basic concepts in probability and includes a chapter on Monte Carlo methods with an extended discussion of Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling. The second section introduces statistics and then develops tools for fitting models to data, comparing and contrasting techniques from both frequentist and Bayesian perspectives. The final section is devoted to methods for analyzing sequences of data, such as correlation functions, periodograms, and image reconstruction. While it goes beyond elementary statistics, the text is self-contained and accessible to readers from a wide variety of backgrounds. Specialized mathematical topics are included in an appendix. Based on a graduate course on data analysis that the author has taught for many years, and couched in the looser, workaday language of scientists and engineers who wrestle directly with data, this book is ideal for courses on data analysis and a valuable resource for students, instructors, and practitioners in the physical sciences and engineering. In-depth discussion of data analysis for scientists and engineers Coverage of both frequentist and Bayesian approaches to data analysis Extensive look at analysis techniques for time-series data and images Detailed exploration of linear and nonlinear modeling of data Emphasis on error analysis Instructor's manual (available only to professors)

The fourth edition of this successful textbook presents a comprehensive introduction to statistical and numerical methods for the evaluation of empirical and experimental data. Equal weight is given to statistical theory and practical problems. The concise mathematical treatment of the subject matter is illustrated by many examples and for the present edition a library of Java programs has been developed. It comprises methods of numerical data analysis and graphical representation as well as many example programs and solutions to programming problems. The book is conceived both as an introduction and as a work of reference. In particular it addresses itself to students, scientists and practitioners in science and engineering as a help in the analysis of their data in laboratory courses, in working for bachelor or master degrees, in thesis work, and in research and professional work.

This textbook teaches advanced undergraduate and first-year graduate students in Engineering and Applied Sciences to gather and analyze empirical observations (data) in order to aid in making design decisions. While science is about discovery, the primary paradigm of engineering and "applied science" is design. Scientists are in the discovery business and want, in general, to understand the natural world rather than to alter it. In contrast, engineers and applied scientists design products, processes, and solutions to problems. That said, statistics, as a discipline, is mostly oriented toward the discovery paradigm. Young engineers come out of their degree programs having taken courses such as "Statistics for Engineers and Scientists" without any clear idea as to how they can use statistical methods to help them design products or processes. Many seem to think that statistics is only useful for demonstrating that a device or process actually does what it was designed to do. Statistics courses emphasize creating predictive or classification models - predicting nature or classifying individuals, and statistics is often used to prove or disprove phenomena as opposed to aiding in the design of a product or process. In industry however, Chemical Engineers use designed experiments to optimize petroleum extraction; Manufacturing Engineers use experimental data to optimize machine operation; Industrial Engineers might use data to determine the optimal number of operators required in a manual assembly process. This text teaches engineering and applied science students to incorporate empirical investigation into such design processes. Much of the discussion in this book is about models, not whether the models truly represent reality but whether they adequately represent reality with respect to the problems at hand; many ideas focus on how to gather data in the most efficient way possible to construct adequate models. Includes chapters on subjects not often seen together in a single text (e.g., measurement systems, mixture experiments, logistic regression, Taguchi methods, simulation) Techniques and concepts introduced present a wide variety of design situations familiar to engineers and applied scientists and inspire incorporation of experimentation and empirical investigation into the design process. Software is integrally linked to statistical analyses with fully worked examples in each chapter; fully worked using several packages: SAS, R, JMP, Minitab, and MS Excel - also including discussion questions at the end of each chapter. The fundamental learning objective of this textbook is for the reader to understand how experimental data can be used to make design decisions and to be familiar with the most common types of experimental designs and analysis methods.

This third edition of Design of Experiments for Engineers and Scientists adds to the tried and trusted tools that were successful in so many engineering organizations with new coverage of design of experiments (DoE) in the service sector. Case studies are updated throughout, and new ones are added on dentistry, higher education, and utilities. Although many books have been written on DoE for statisticians, this book overcomes the challenges a wider audience faces in using statistics by using easy-to-read graphical tools. Readers will find the concepts in this book both familiar and easy to understand, and users will soon be able to apply them in their work or research. This classic book is essential reading for engineers and scientists from all disciplines tackling all kinds of product and process quality problems and will be an ideal resource for students of this topic. Written in nonstatistical language, the book is an essential and accessible text for scientists and engineers who want to learn how to use DoE Explains why teaching DoE techniques in the improvement phase of Six Sigma is an important part of problem-solving methodology New edition includes two new chapters on DoE for services as well as case studies illustrating its wider application in the service industry

Introduces the philosophy of experimentation and the part that statistics plays in experimentation. Emphasizes the need to develop a capability for statistical thinking by using examples drawn from actual case studies.