Reliability improvement of diamond drill bits using design of experiments

Design of experiments has received much attention in the context of reliability improvement. Many engineers and researchers are considering how to use designed experiments to improve the reliability of products and processes. This work illustrates a 12-run Plackett-Burman design and its analysis to improve the reliability of a diamond drill bit. A detailed description and execution of the design are provided including how to choose the factors and determine the number of experimental factors. In addition, the results of the real-world experiment are presented and the predicted performance from statistical model fitting is verified by part of a confirmation experiment. The experimental data show that the recommended factor settings substantially improved the reliability of the diamond drill bits.