South Australian Museum - North Terrace, Adelaide, South Australia 5000

Biography

My position also includes, Adjunct Research Professor Ian Wark Research Institute, University of South Australia. Affiliated Associate Professor, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Adelaide.

I have been at the South Australian Museum for most of my career and divide my time between building the minerals collections and doing research on minerals. My research interests are in mineralogy and solid state chemistry in particular the relationship between the structure and chemistry of minerals. In my HRTEM studies of complex sulfide minerals I documented processes of long and short-range order and compositional modulations, showing that true solid solutions in these minerals are rare. In recent years I have concentrated on studying the kinetics of reactions and transformations in iron and nickel sulfides using neutron and x-ray diffraction and developing cells for in situ neutron diffraction under hydrothermal conditions. I have been involved both in experimental studies and in developing kinetic theory for these solid-state reactions and dissolution-precipitation reactions. A major conclusion of this work is that metal ions in sulfides remain relatively mobile down to ambient temperatures and nearly all of the textures observed in sulfide minerals are post depositional products. The activation energies for transitions and transformations in sulfide minerals are generally an order of magnitude lower than they are for similar transitions in silicates and oxides. Because of high ion mobility in sulfides reactions are likely to take place during ore processing and these must be taken into account in the design of process systems.

In my research I have active collaborations with my colleague Joel Brugger and with Michael Carpenter (Cambridge), Andrew Putnis (Münster,), Nigel Cook (Oslo) Uwe Kolitsch (Vienna) and others.

Major Publications: (Top 5)

Tenailleau, C., Pring, A., Etschmann, B., Brugger, J., Grguric, B. and Putnis, A. Transformation of pentlandite to violarite under mild hydrothermal conditions. American Mineralogist, 91,706-709, 2006.

Wang, H., Pring, A., Ngothai, Y., O'Neill, B. A low-temperature kinetic study of the exsolution of pentlandite from the monosulfide solid solution using a refined Avrami method. Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, 69, 415-125. 2005.

Ciobanu, C.L., Pring, A. and Cook, N.J. Micron- to nano-scale intergrowths among members of the cuprobismutite series and padraite: HRTEM and microanalytical evidence. Mineralogical Magazine, 68, 279-300, 2004.

Pring, A., Jercher, M. and Makovicky, E. Disorder and compositional variation in the lillianite homologous series. Mineralogical Magazine, 63, 917-926, 1999.

Pring, A. Annealing of synthetic hammarite, Cu2Pb2Bi4S9, and the nature of cation ordering processes in the bismuthinite-aikinite series. American Mineralogist, 80, 1168-1175 1995.