SAMPLING STRATEGY AND ITS EFFECT ON THE PRECISION OF RESULTS OF ORE ANALYSIS

The paper deals with the last step of a sampling procedure - sample taking from a laboratory sample. The description of various sampling techniques is presented. These methods were applied to two gold-bearing materials. The sampling of single clusters fails with segregated materials; incremental sampling (several increments are taken to results in the final sample) and using of a sample divider give good results for segregated materials as well. The stratified sampling enables to separate gold particles beforehand and yields the lowest sampling variance. A new method for predicting sampling variance using a computer simulation is presented. Predicted data are in good agreement with experimental ones.