Designing trials with convincing results is essential if suppliers want to convince mining companies of the benefit of their products and services. In statistics, a result is considered convincing if it is “significant”. Significance, is a way of measuring the probability that the result could have occurred by chance.
In this casestudy, power analysis has been used to determine the number of intact rock strength samples required to detect a “significant” difference between conditioned (blast damaged) and undamaged samples. Power analysis demonstrated that rock with a UCS of 160 MPa, and standard deviation of 10 MPa, requires at least 25 conditioned (damaged) and 25 undamaged samples to achieve less than a 10% probability that a result could have occurred by chance (Power > 90%).This enabled decision makers to have confidence that proceeding with the trial would generate convincing results.
