A couple of years ago, Domo PolyPropylene Compounds (a producer of thermoplastic materials), Europlasma (a developer of gas plasma systems), Structuplas (a company that specialized in the finishing of thermoplastic materials) and Techni-Coat International (a company that specialized in applying coatings) joined forces to conduct a large experiment to investigate the joint effect of several additives and a gas plasma surface treatment on the adhesive properties of polypropylene.
They used design of experiments (DoE) to define the polypropylene formulations and gas plasma treatments to be tested. After the experiment, they used a statistical analysis technique called regression analysis to build an expert system that was able to predict the best gas plasma treatment for any polypropylene formulation. Before the expert system was in place, excessive testing was necessary to find a suitable gas plasma treatment for every polypropylene formulation. Now, the expert system predicts the best gas plasma treatments, after which only a couple of confirmatory tests have to be done. Needless to say that this saved much time and costs.
