Happy Sunday, a wonderful community of JMP!
I will likely have to design and run a set or sequential experiments to maximize the yield of chemical synthesis.
Someone in our group ran this chemical reaction in the past. However, my manager wants me to repeat this reaction to better understand the relationship between reaction conditions and yield. Based on the historical data, there are three takeaways.
1. Total calcium concentration is very important.
2. The ratio of ammonia to potassium in the reaction impact the yield but at lesser extent.
3. Total ammonia concentration might have some impact on reaction but hard to estimate degree (or size) of impact based on the historical data.
Therefore, I set up the three factors I want to investigate: 1) calcium concentration, 2) the ratio of ammonia to potassium, and 3) Ammonia concentration.
Here I included 7 different levels of calcium concentrations as it changes the yield across a broad concentration range of calcium. We also want to have three discrete ratios of ammonia and potassium. Then I also want to investigate whether ammonia concentration impact the yield.
Below is what JMP suggested, and I am quite satisfied as: 1) it suggested 14 runs within the resource limit. 2) it efficiently fills up the design space.
However, as indicated earlier, it is hard to gauge if ammonia concentration has any impact on the yield purely based on the historical data. I am tempted to run a small pilot study to see whether ammonia concentration has any impact. For instance, I run three reaction conditions where the calcium concentration and the ratio of ammonia to potassium concentrations are fixed, and the ammonia concentration is varied (30~50 mM).
If ammonia ends up not having a significant impact on yield, I would be able to build more thorough RSM with only two factors (calcium concentration and the ratio of ammonia to potassium). However, at the same time, I would be missing an opportunity to investigate the potential impact of ammonia on yield at different concentrations of calcium and the ratio of ammonia to potassium (it is more like one factor at a time + DOE).
I would like to get any opinions from more experienced JMP users on how to approach this kind of problems.