Six soil subsampling methods were evaluated with explosive compounds-contaminated soils to quantify the variance associated with each method. The methods include modified grab sampling, simplified ripple splitting, fractional shoveling, coning & quatering, degenerate fractional shoveling, and rolling & quatering. All the methods resulted in significantly lower CV (coefficient of variation) of 1~5%, compared to common grab sampling that gave 8~98% of CV, possibly due to the reduction of grouping and segregation errors described by Gy sampling theory. Among the methods, simplified ripple splitting tends to result in lower explosive compounds concentrations, while the rolling & quatering gave the opposite result. Fractional shoveling method showed the least variance and the highest reproducibility in the analysis.

Keywords: Analysis;Explosive compounds;Soil splitting;Subsampling;UPLC;