Property Mapping of Polymer Blends: An Application of I-Optimal DOE in JMP®
Joe N. Hockman, DuPont
A DuPont polymers business launched a large R&D growth program to map out the properties of polymer blends involving two classes of polymers. Individually, each polymer class had wide commercial applications with different but well understood property profiles. We anticipated that blends of these two polymer classes may offer unique property profiles that may be well suited to new market applications where neither individual polymer class could be commercially applied. Our program systematically investigated blends through eight sequential DOEs on partially overlapping and disjoint polymer blend spaces. In each case, custom designs for some what irregular and imbalanced design spaces were required due to limited available polymer grades with differing compositions and resin properties. Algorithmically generated designs for custom models from manually constructed candidate sets were needed for most DOEs. This poster highlights selected results on one I-optimal DOE and provides a summary of our property model validation DOE with runs applicable to this and other DOEs.