Experimental Design Step by Step: A Practical Guide for Beginners

Inside the world of chemometrics, a fundamental role is played by the experimental design. Although introduced almost a century ago (1935), it is still not widely employed by chemists and its usefulness continues to be underestimated. When asking why, the answers are often the following: it is too difficult to apply and too much experimental effort is required. Actually, a deeper knowledge on the topic could offer a different point of view. The aim of the present tutorial is to introduce the experimental design to beginners, by providing the theoretical basic principles as well as a practical guide to use the most common designs, from the experimental plan to the final optimization. Response surface methodology will be discussed, and the main terms related to model computation and statistical evaluations usually performed by software will be explained, in order to give suitable tools to properly use them.