A customer approached OMG Borchers asking if the company could provide a second source for an associative thickener used in a family of waterborne coatings. The challenge was that the thickener needed to match the properties of the incumbent thickener in three different classes of products with a different chemical composition than the incumbent. “Trying to find a mixture that delivered the required performance in all these different applications using the trial-and-error method would have been like trying to find a needle in a haystack,” said Kip Howard, National Account Manager for OM Group. Instead, Howard used the design of experiments (DOE) method to develop a mixture experiment to screen the effects of four candidate additives.
Based on the results, a second designed experiment was conducted with the two additives that performed the best in the first experiment, plus one more, and using much more detailed measurement methods. The formulation that resulted from the second DOE was virtually indistinguishable from the incumbent in all three applications. “We achieved a much better match in a fraction of the time that would have been required using traditional trial-and-error methods,” Howard said.