Supervisor: Prof. Hari Tsikos
Sponsor: Rhodes University-Levenstein Bursary
Co-sponsor: CIMERA
Donald Motilaodi comes from Rustenburg in the beautiful province of North West, South Africa. He completed his BSc degree in 2014, majoring in both Chemistry and Geology at Rhodes University. Then, in 2015 he completed his Honours degree in geology as part of which he carried out a project looking into the petrography and mineral chemistry of the high-grade top manganese ore-layer at N'chwaning mine, Kalahari Mn Field, Northern Cape Province under the supervision of Prof. Hari Tsikos. His MSc project is essentially a continuation of his earlier work, with emphasis on understanding the distribution of Fe in the high-grade Kalahari Mn ores. He is specifically interested in the mineralogical distribution of Fe with emphasis on its variable partitioning in Mn oxide and silicate minerals, and the controls thereof. To achieve this, he is using a combination of mineralogical analytical techniques and methodologies available in-house, such as basic ore-petrography; scanning electron microscopy (SEM); electron-probe microanalyses (EPMA); and x-ray diffraction analysis (XRD).
Mineral-chemical variation in high-grade ores of the Kalahari Manganese Field, and implications for geometallurgy
Email: g11m3639@campus.ru.ac.za
Cell: 0765687226