Modelling Porosity Permeability of Ceramic Tiles using Fuzzy Taguchi Method

Abstract

Taguchi experiment design in quality development studies, is an approach to engineering that supports research and development, product design and product development activities by enabling fewer trials of experiments to determine the best combinations of inputs that affect the outcome. In this study, the factors affecting the porosity were studied in a firm that produces ceramic tile. There were 6 factors considered to be important in total and 2 levels in each factor. L8 orthogonal array were used during the experiment design, which proposes 8 experiment types with different factor levels. The results of the experiments were analyzed so that important factors were determined. Significance of factors were tested by ANOVA and 4 of them were found to be significant. These factors were fuzzified by assessing the factors using linguistic expressions and then triangular fuzzy numbers. A model with 4 inputs and 1 output was built and 34 rules were generated for this model. The developed model was shown to be a useful approach in modeling the porosity permeability of ceramic tiles.