Slope-rotatable Designs for Estimating the Slope of Response Surfaces in Experiments with Mixtures

In this paper a class of mixture designs for estimating the slope of second order Scheffe polynomial response surfaces for mixture experiments with q components is presented. The variance of the estimated directional slope at a point is a function of the direction of the slope and the design. If the variance is averaged over all possible directions in the (q-1)-dimensional simplex, the averaged variance is only a function of the point and the design. By choice of design, it is possible to make this variance constant for all points equidistant from the centroid point. This property is called "slope-rotatability over al directions in the simplex", and the necessary and sufficient conditions for mixture design to have this property are given and proved. The class of designs with this property is compared with other mixture designs and discussed.discussed.