Essay example --

I. INTRODUCTION T HE WAY in which the quality of manufactured view stones are analyzed in this paper is to conduct a designed experiment considering the different factors that is thought would influence their appearance, mechanical and technical performances. Natural stones, especially granite, have been used for flooring, view and also as countertop material in houses for their beauty and elegance. However, even though they are very durable, scratch and heat resistant, it has other inherent less desirable characteristics. They contain tiny pits and natural fissures that may appear to be cracks, although these are inherent features. Besides, they are subject to tone variation and it is not easy to achieve smooth transition in the range of shades when it is used in large areas. The high price is the other disadvantage of the natural stones. An alternative is engineered stones which are also durable to some extent but without the less-desirable characteristics of natural stone. Different techniques have been applied to produce the artificial stones with proper characteristics such as reconstituted or re-composed stones. Among these different techniques the polymer based stones are gaining more attention and popularity due to their lower pri ce, diversity and fair mechanical and apparent performances. Also, the materials can be fabricated in large sizes, resulting in less joints and better aesthetics. Fabrication of simulated stone to withstand loads from wind, gravity, movement of building structure, and thermally induced movement, as well as to resist deterioration under conditions of normal use including exposure to weather, without failure. On the other hand since the main use of them is in buildings’ view applications, beauty an... ...the best results are achieved due to optimization of all response variables and the faulty products are avoided. Following the DOE analysis, another study is conducted to find the best parameter setting of manufacturing process. This problem is a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem due to different response variables. Some of the key features of engineered view stones are qualitative features. Therefore, fuzzy TOPSIS tool is used. Using the proposed method to build a model of the process to efficiently adjust the controllable parameters the proper responses are experimentally achieved. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Manufacturing and parameters’ selection are discussed in Section II. Section III describes the DOE method which is applied. Fuzzy TOPSIS method is briefly introduced in section IV. The concluding remarks are drawn in Section V.