An Analytical Approach to Assess Quality Control Sample Sizes of Cement-Based Solidification/Stabilization

Abstract

This paper presents an analytical approach to selecting the sample size required to achieve acceptable quality control in a cement-based solidification/stabilization construction cell program intended for the treatment/containment of contaminated soils. The proposed approach is based on the hypothesis test that the cell does not have an acceptably low hydraulic conductivity (the null hypothesis), versus the alternative hypothesis that it does. Analytical solutions are developed to compute the probabilities of both type I (mistakenly rejecting the null hypothesis) and type II (mistakenly failing to reject the null hypothesis) errors as functions of the number of samples and the statistics of the hydraulic conductivity field. The analytical results are validated by Monte Carlo simulations and are then used to develop rational sampling requirements. An example is presented to illustrate how the proposed approach can be used in practice to assess the required sample size for the quality control program of cement-based S/S construction cells.