Dear Jubril Hassan

I do not advance in miner and geological area, but any way i have looked some text book special to "The elements occurrence and technology" by Boguslawa Jezowska Trzerbiatowska, Stanislaw Kopacz and Teofil Milusski (1989). 

Hope will be helping you

Best regard's

Zolhizir bin Daud

thank you sir, but how can i get access to these textbook? i tried but coul not get access or a link to it online.

Dear Jubril Hassan,

Before your question can be answered meaningfully, you should explain in more detail the differences between the terms "ditch cuttings", "drilled cuttings" and "core samples", you used.

What is the particle size?

What is the particle shape?

Are the samples average samples of the deposit?

How strong is the degree of weathering, etc.?

Thank you!

Best regards,

Guenter Grundmann

the samples are gotten from drilling but in loose rather than compacted cores. it was also gotten in the course of core drilling from depth  of about 12meters. since it is not compact, we are doubting if it canbe representative of the deposit at depth since we suspect that there may be the possibility of it containing materials from the upper formation. the particle size ranges from sand to silt. 

Dear Jubril Hassan,

I beg your pardon, but that sounds very hopeless for me. Just as it is now, no representative material for further investigation can be selected.

Best regards,

Guenter Grundmann

Not knowing the details of your site and collection methods, I wouldn't say it was quite as hopeless as Guenter Grundmann suggests above. I work with drilled/ ditch cuttings all the time - though in a possibly different context to you, i.e. oil wells. I'm also not sure that we'd be talking about the same things when using the same terms.

To me, "ditch cuttings" are what are separated from circulated drilling mud by shaker screens (or other appropriate machinery. That implies a number of other things : the mud is re-cycled and goes round the hole multiple times ; the hole has some form of casing (possibly a concrete-lined "cellar" or "ditch" which separates the drilled materials from loose surface soil ; there is some method of monitoring the hole geometry (e.g. bit depth) and amount of mud pumped (stroke counter or work measure on the pump(s).

Separating the borehole from the soil is necessary for hole stability, if the soil is loose.  The mud volume pumped and geometry questions allow you to estimate the depth below the surface at which the mud currently coming over the shakers passed through the drilling/ coring bit. This is an estimate for the position in the wellbore that the current cuttings came from.

There are a lot of cautions over using "ditch" cuttings for anything, most of which start with the fact that there is substantial cross-contamination between cuttings from one depth and cuttings from a shallower depth (along-hole ; add your own complications for non-straight, non-vertical boreholes). So your data fidelity is going to be poorer. But on the other hand, if that is the only data that you've got, it is not hopeless, even if it isn't perfect.

After getting your cuttings, if you can, identify and remove contamination from overburden. Easy if your target is bright red and your overburden white ; not so easy if there is less contrast. Depending on what you know already about your ore body, you may be able to exclude gangue cuttings too, or to pick specific cuttings of the target minerals. Obviously, this is going to bias any reserve/ resource estimates you make.

Your cuttings will (not "might", "will") be contaminated with the drilling mud used, so ideally you would need samples of that, from beginning middle and end of the drillign run. If they weren't caught ... perhaps soaking some of the gangue or overburden cuttings from the "picking" step above could give you some approximation to the composition of the mud.

It's not hopeless, but because the data precision is considerably poorer than from (for example) core, then you'll need to collect more data to get less unreliable results.

[Ho-hum : time for me to go to the oil rig's shale shakers again, to examine drilled cuttings for gross lithology and biostratigraphy potential. It is NOT hopeless, but the data isn't as good as coring.]

 I think you should make a detailed study of cuttings and samples at the same depth of the same hole, perform chemical and petrographic analysis to compare both setting data. just so, you can have an order error by cuttings. You should do a correlation with other data of nearby wells possibly from the samples and so you would have a percentage of trace elements at that depth of the cuttings correlated with the core samples data.

To prepare the cuttings for trace element REE and isotopic analysis it would be the same for the core samples. 

It is not hopeless but you will have to be carefull to separate cuttings that are not from the lag depth and may be from shallow formations previously drilled. Also, there could be some winnowing effect as a result of particle shape, density and grain size. Lighter and or smaller particles may have a tendency to remain entrained in the drilling mud and may be recirculated. Larger and denser particles may tend to sink when circulation stops during a drill pipe connection.

You can make use of any available samples,either dicth or core but what matters is knowing the age range of your various samples if you are doing correlation. Even if you have core samples it would still eventually be pulverized before any analysis can be carried out.