Suppose that five different methods are used to refine an oil product. Each method may result in a different viscosity of the product. Each method is applied to one barrel of oil at a time which results in one batch of product. A company wants to use the method which results in the lowest viscosity, and they want to design an experiment to test this.

a) What are the experimental units in this experiment?

b) What are the treatments?

c) What is the response variable?

d) Suppose that 6 different plants use each of these 5 methods. Each plant is willing to be involved in the experiment. Each plant will produce 10 batches, that is each plant gets 10 barrels of oil. Explain how the use of blocking should be incorporated into our experiment and how the randomization is to be done.