Ervin Kováts

Ervin Kováts (* 29. September 1927 in Budapest , † 7 June 2012 in Morges VD ) was in Switzerland acting chemist of Hungarian origin.

Life

Kováts studied chemical engineering at the Technical University of Budapest . After completing his studies, he moved to Switzerland in 1949, where he received his doctorate on “catalytic dehydrogenation of hydroazulenes in the gas phase”. From 1955 he worked as a post-doc in Leopold Ružička's laboratory at the ETH Zurich . His field of work was the chemical composition of essential oils . While working with the then new method of gas chromatography , he developed the system of retention indices , which are also known as the Kovats index . They are considered to be groundbreaking findings for the use of gas chromatography as an analytical method. From 1967 on, Kováts was a professor at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne , the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, where he retired in 1994.

Kovats index

The Kovats index uses the relationship between carbon content and retention time of a substance in a gas chromatographic system to obtain a device-independent value for the identification of unknown substances.

For isothermal gas chromatography it is described by the following equation:

${\displaystyle I=100\times \left[n+(N-n){\frac {\log(t_{r({\text{unknown}})}')-\log(t_{r(n)}')}{\log(t_{r(N)}')-\log(t_{r(n)}')}}\right]}$

The following applies:

${\displaystyle I=}$ Kovat's retention time index,

${\displaystyle n=}$Number of carbon atoms of the first n-alkane ,

${\displaystyle N=}$ Number of carbon atoms of the second n-alkane,

${\displaystyle t_{r}=}$ Retention time

For temperature programmed gas chromatography the Kovats index is described by the following equation:

${\displaystyle I=100\times \left[n+(N-n){\frac {t_{r({\text{unknown}})}-t_{r(n)}}{t_{r(N)}-t_{r(n)}}}\right]}$

The following applies:

${\displaystyle I=}$ Kovat's retention time index,

${\displaystyle n=}$ Number of carbon atoms of the first n-alkane,

${\displaystyle N=}$ Number of carbon atoms of the second n-alkane,

${\displaystyle t_{r}=}$ Retention time

Honors

• Tsvett Medal of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Moscow (1977)
• Martin Award from the Chromatographic Society (1986)
• Medals of Honor from the Budapest University of Technology (1986) and the University of Helsinki (1987)
• Halász Medal (2004)

literature

• Ervin Kovats: Gas-chromatographic characterization of organic compounds. Part 1: Retention indices of aliphatic halides, alcohols, aldehydes and ketones. Helv. Chim. Acta, 1958, 41 (7): 1915-32, doi : 10.1002 / hlca.19580410703
• Leslie S. Ettre: Seventieth birthday of Ervin sz. Kováts. Chromatographia, September 1997, Volume 46, Issue 5-6, pp 230-232
• ISIC newsletter: In Memoriam Professor Ervin Kováts 1927-2012 (PDF; 5.2 MB)