Response surface exploration for elastic modulus of epoxy concrete by multi-component mixture design

The concept of relating the physical characteristics of a multi-component composite with its component proportions involves the determination of a mathematical equation that adequately represents the response surface. The objective of this paper is to describe the shape of the response surface of elastic modulus of epoxy concrete over the simplex factor space (experimental region) with the help of the simplex-centroid design and the associated polynomial model and to determine the roles played by individual components. Epoxy concrete is a synthetic composite material specially developed for precision machine tool structures. The proposed model to which observations were fitted is the Scheffe's special cubic model for the simplex-centriod design. The adequacy of the fitted model was tested by both check points and F-test to ensure that it predicts a value at each point in the experimental region which is as close as possible to the true value of the response.