A full factorial is a design in which the experimental runs utilise every possible combination for the factors and their respective levels. They can be very useful when you want to estimate high order interactions, for example 4-factor interactions. However, they become increasingly costly as the number of runs required increases a lot with respect to the number of factors and their levels.

In this tutorial you will learn:

How to select and calculate a full factorial design for your defined factors and levels.

Defining a full factorial design

Once two or more factors have been defined, click on “Calculate Design” in the DOE design window to choose a DOE design. To learn how to define factors and their levels, click here.
Click on the Full Factorial Design tab and Synthace will start calculating a design automatically. Once the design calculation has completed you will see design diagnostics in the Diagnostics panel. To learn more about design diagnostics, click here.
Control runs can be specified in the Controls panel by clicking on Add and manually filling in the table with factor levels. To learn more about defining control runs, click here.
The calculated factor levels for each run can be found in the Design panel. You can also decide how to group runs together based on factors and their levels and allocate them to different simulations for execution purposes here. To learn more about grouping runs to different simulations, click here.

Configuring your full factorial design.

The number of runs you require for your full factorial is automatically calculated for you and can not be changed.
Specify how many times you would like to replicate your entire full factorial design in the Replicates input in the settings panel.

Note: While full factorial designs can be very powerful, with very few factors they can have very low power. To counter this you can replicate your design to be able to identify the interactions you care about. Changing the value in this field will trigger a recalculation of your design.
If you have specified more than one replicate in the replicates panel you can also define how you want the runs in those replicates to be ordered. By default the replicate order will be to repeat the same run order in each of the replicates of the design.

You can also choose to keep each replicate run next to one another, randomize all runs across all replicates or randomize the runs within each replicate group independently.

Note: changing the replicate ordering option will not recalculate your design, but the order of the runs will be updated in the design matrix at the bottom of the page. To learn more about replicating run order, click here.
Once your design has been calculated - you can click Simulate With Design. To learn more about simulating workflows with a DOE design, click here.