Use of Software to Facilitate Intumescent Fire-retardant Coatings for Structural Steelworks's Formulation

This paper presents a uniform design methodology for computer assisted experimental design for intumescent fire retardant coating (IFRC) formulations, exemplifies the benefits of using experimental design together with software to facilitate the formulation of an IFRC for structural steelworks. By applying a multivariate design for the screening experiments, many intumescent fire retardants were evaluated in comparatively few experiments. In this work, prior information has been used in the form of a model, based on historical experiments. A uniform design criterion is used to design a few additional experiments so that the resulting model can have an acceptable prediction power. A confirmatory experiment step is shown that a design which uses the uniform design methodology taking advantage of the experimental data collected from the DOE that using fewer trials gives a model with equivalent prediction capability. This can be critical where experiments are expensive to perform.