Walkthrough

The QC system — trusting your numbers

Known values in a certified standard, a blank, a split duplicate — slipped in among your real samples The lab runs the batch Certificate comes back Verdict reported vs. known, certificate by certificate, on the QC pages The lab never knows which samples are the tests. That's the whole point.

Quality control is how you earn the right to use your assay numbers — in a resource estimate, a press release, or just a drill-hole decision. The idea is old and simple: slip known quantities in among your samples, and check what the lab says about them.

The three checks

  • Standards — pulps with certified element values. If the lab reports a standard well outside its certified range, every number on that certificate deserves suspicion.
  • Blanks — barren material. Any real grade in a blank means contamination or sample-swap somewhere between the splitter and the instrument.
  • Duplicates — splits of the same material submitted twice. They measure repeatability; wildly different pairs point at nugget effect or lab precision problems.

The lab never knows which samples are the tests — that's the whole point.

Where verdicts live: the QC pages

geoDB judges these automatically, certificate by certificate, on your project's QC pages — charts of standard performance against certified limits, blank results over time, duplicate scatter, and a verdict per certificate. When something fails, the failure is visible and attributable: this certificate, this standard, this much out.

One habit worth building: the QC pages are the one place QC verdicts come from. Ad-hoc checks in a spreadsheet — or a quick statistical look you ask Petra for — are fine for exploring, but the verdict of record is the QC page, and Petra will point you there rather than re-derive one.

Getting QC data in

Nothing extra to do on the way in: QC samples arrive with your ordinary imports. When a certificate lands, geoDB recognises standards, blanks and duplicates (from your sample naming and the reference-standards library), attaches them to the certificate, and the verdict pages update. Your project can pre-select which certified reference materials it uses, so loggers pick from a short list instead of the whole catalogue.

How often QC samples go in — every N samples, and which types — is set separately, in a QC insertion protocol. A project can hold several (an RC campaign and a soils grid want different rates), with one marked as the default.