Balance Between Quantity and Quality of Samples

  • Marat Abzalov
Chapter
First Online:
Part of the Modern Approaches in Solid Earth Sciences book series (MASE, volume 12)

Abstract

Evaluation of the mining project and exploitation of the mines depends on quality and quantity of analytical data which are usually obtained by assaying drill hole samples distributed on regular grids. Uncertainty of the estimated grades, depends on the assays precision (i.e. repeatability), on the spatial distribution (i.e. spacing of the drill holes) and also on a spatial continuity of the studied variables. A novel approach suggested for determining an optimal ratio between samples quality and the drill holes spacing by comparing relative variance of the samples duplicates and the nugget effect of the pair-wise relative variogram.

Keywords

Optimal sampling CV% Grade control 
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References

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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  • Marat Abzalov
    • 1
    • 2
  1. 1.MASSA geoservicesMount ClaremontAustralia
  2. 2.Centre for Exploration Targeting (CET)University of Western AustraliaCrawleyAustralia

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