Abstract
An attempt has been made to quantify the effects o f amount of prestraining, ageing time and temperature, on the mechanical properties of strainaged Nb-bearing HSLA steel with the help of statistical design of experiment; for this, the method of design of 2n factorial experiments is used to obtain response surface equations. The coefficients in the regression equations obtained are corrected with the help of student t test. The equations obtained are checked by Fischer F test and are found to be quite adequate in predicting the mechanical properties with 95% accuracy.
Further, an attempt has been made to explore the region of maximum response ΔY (i.e., increase of flow stress due to strainageing) by the method of steepest ascent.
