The SMC sample mass calculator for particulate materials

The SMC Sample Mass Calculator implements a new way of calculating the required sample mass during the sampling of granular materials. The novel approach presented here allows for calculating the required sample mass even when information about the concentrations in the particles is absent. This is of practical interest, because detailed information on the concentrations of the property of interest in each particle is generally difficult to obtain. The SMC requires as input parameters: a particle size distribution, an estimate of the concentration in the population, minimum and maximum concentrations in each particle, the densities of the particles, the shape factor and a value for the tolerated relative standard deviation of the sampling error. The applicability of the SMC is discussed and numerical examples are presented using test data from literature.