ABSTRACT
Chromatography is an experimental separation science. Its progress, both in the context of theory development and finding new applications, is based on performing experiments and making appropriate conclusions from their results. This chapter designs as an introductory tutorial. It lacks detailed mathematical background, as ready-to-use procedures are available in many statistical and numerical software packages, including Rouvray (R) and MATLAB. The chapter widely covers the mathematical issues in cited references. The screening step is generally done with many factors, a screening design is applied, and the results are used to make a choice of the most relevant factors for optimization. Fractional factorial designs contain only a fraction of the experiments existing in the full version. An alternative for the fractional factorial designs are the Plackett–Burman designs. It can be constructed for a number of experiments n, which is a multiple of four and it can estimate up to n - 1 main effects.
