Hlanganani Tutu

Professor in the School of Chemistry, University of the Witwatersrand
My research field is environmental analytical chemistry. My areas of interest include: analytical method development for water and soil analysis; the chemistry of acid mine/rock drainage; elemental speciation in polluted environments (water and soil systems); water quality assessment; remediation and mitigation aspects (development and modification of materials for the capture of pollutants in polluted water; constructed and natural wetland systems); value recovery (recovery of precious elements and rare earths from wastewaters; alternative uses of waste and wastewaters); geochemical modelling (predicting elemental speciation; forward and inverse modelling; 1-D, 2-D and 3-D reactive transport modelling; pit lake chemistry; evaporite and secondary mineral formation); and applications of artificial intelligence (optimisation and heuristic methods; classification; machine learning; deep learning; text minig; large language models; internet of things (IoT)).

Computational competence: PHREEQC, PHAST, MODFLOW, FEFLOW, Geochemist’s Workbench, Visual Minteq, Statistica, Visual Gene Developer, Minitab, SIMCA, R, SQL, Python, C and Fortran.

My published research:

Comparison of individual and ensemble machine learning models for prediction of sulphate levels in untreated and treated Acid Mine Drainage
Environmental Monitoring and Assessment
2024/04 | journal-article
DOI: 10.1007/s10661-024-12467-8

The transport of toxic elements from the Marie-Louise landfill site and nearby gold mine dumps to waterbodies
International Mine Water Association Congress 2024
2024/04 | conference-paper

Trends in Innovations and Recent Advances in Membrane Protected Extraction Techniques for Organics in Complex Samples
Critical Reviews in Analytical Chemistry
2023/08/18 | journal-article
DOI: 10.1080/10408347.2021.2013769

Microplastics in freshwater environment: the first evaluation in sediment of the Vaal River, South Africa
Heliyon
2022/10 | journal-article
DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e11118

Comparison of PSA to Moringa Oleifera Seed Protein as Sorbent in QuEChERS: A Response Surface Methodology Optimization for Extraction of Some Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals in Food
Journal of Chemistry
2022/09/13 | journal-article
DOI: 10.1155/2022/7161318

Multivariate optimization of a two-way technique for extraction of pharmaceuticals in surface water using a combination of membrane assisted solvent extraction and a molecularly imprinted polymer
Chemosphere
2022/01 | journal-article
DOI: 10.1016/j.chemosphere.2021.131973

In Situ Decarboxylation-Pressurized Hot Water Extraction for Selective Extraction of Cannabinoids from Cannabis sativa. Chemometric Approach
Molecules
2021/06/02 | journal-article
DOI: 10.3390/molecules26113343

Selective Extraction of Cannabinoid Compounds from Cannabis Seed Using Pressurized Hot Water Extraction
Molecules
2020/03 | journal-article
DOI: 10.3390/molecules25061335

Statistical comparison of two modeling methods on pressurized hot water extraction of vitamin C and phenolic compounds from Moringa oleifera leaves
South African Journal of Botany
2020/03 | journal-article
DOI: 10.1016/j.sajb.2018.09.001

Sorption of uranium(VI) onto hydrous ferric oxide-modified zeolite: Assessment of the effect of pH, contact time, temperature, selected cations and anions on sorbent interactions
Journal of Environmental Management
2017/12 | journal-article
DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2017.09.034

Synthesis and characterization of a molecularly imprinted polymer for the isolation of the 16 US-EPA priority polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in solution
Journal of Environmental Management
2017/09 | journal-article
DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2017.05.041

Dispersion of inorganic contaminants in surface water in the vicinity of Potchefstroom
Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, Parts A/B/C
2017/08 | journal-article
DOI: 10.1016/j.pce.2017.04.008