Günter Gruhn

Günter Gruhn 2014

Günter Gruhn (born June 28, 1935 in Berlin ; † March 1, 2019 ) was a German engineer and professor of process engineering . In the period 1970 to 2000 in particular, he had a major influence on the development of process engineering in research and teaching at colleges and universities in Germany .

Life

Günter Gruhn was born in Berlin as the son of the employee Johannes Gruhn and his wife Gertrud. From 1941 to 1943 he first attended an elementary school in Berlin. After moving to Luckau (Brandenburg) in the course of the evacuation due to the bombing raids on Berlin, he continued his school education there and graduated in 1953 with the Abitur at the Luckau Extended High School. In preparation for his studies, he then went through a 1-year pre-study internship in industry.

From 1954 to 1959 Günter Gruhn studied at the Dresden University of Transport, specializing in mechanical engineering . During his studies he developed special interests in technical thermodynamics . He completed his studies with a thesis on state diagrams with exergy , supervised by Professor Norbert Elsner (Chair of Technical Thermodynamics), as a graduate engineer.

Immediately afterwards he began working as a research assistant and, after completing his doctorate, as a senior research assistant with Professor Norbert Elsner. The doctorate to Dr.-Ing. Took place in 1963 at the Technical University of Dresden on the basis of a dissertation on the thermodynamic evaluation of left-hand processes and coupled thermal processes (reviewers: Norbert Elsner and Heinz Jungnickel ). The habilitation for Dr.-Ing. habil. took place in 1966 with a thesis on heat and mass transfer in free turbulence and applications in ventilation and air conditioning technology .

In 1966 Günter Gruhn moved to a chemical plant construction company in Dresden, where he was head of the process engineering department. His area of ​​responsibility included the procedural planning of low-temperature plants and petrochemical plants as well as the participation in their commissioning.

Worked at the Technical University of Leuna-Merseburg

In 1968 he was appointed professor for the field of system process engineering at the Technical University "Carl Schorlemmer" Leuna-Merseburg . This is the first professorship that was established in Germany for this scientifically novel field. A little later, the system process engineering science area was founded at this university.

Gruhn's activities were aimed at developing system process engineering teaching and research and bringing corresponding research results to industrial effectiveness in collaboration with chemical companies and plant engineering companies. Lectures have been held for many years on process engineering and refrigeration technology. The main research areas were: modeling and computer-aided simulation of process engineering systems, optimization of processes and plants in the petrochemical and oil processing industry, design and control of chemical multi-product plants, energy supply of chemical plants and problems of the reliability of chemical plants. In this context, he was responsible for over 250 diploma theses and around 30 dissertations. 4 habilitations were also completed in his area.

From 1970 to 1977 Gruhn held the elective position as director of the process engineering section and from 1981 to 1989 as prorector for natural sciences and technology at the Merseburg University of Applied Sciences. Gruhn has received numerous state awards and awards from scientific organizations for his scientific work.

In 1982 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Dmitri Mendeleev University of Chemical and Engineering in Russia .

In 1969/70 Gruhn was also head of the engineering research department at Leuna-Werke.

Worked at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg

Günter Gruhn worked at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg from 1993 to 2003 , from 1996 as head of the Institute for Process and Plant Engineering. The lectures extended to the areas of process and plant engineering, process system engineering and flexibility and reliability of process engineering plants. In research, he and his colleagues worked on problems relating to process synthesis and process optimization, production control of multi-product plants and the optimization of blending processes in refineries. Together with Joachim Werther and his colleagues, extensive work on modeling and simulating complex process engineering systems with solids was carried out. For the first time, a corresponding, universally applicable flow diagram simulation system was developed. The system and the associated know-how were taken over by a US software company.

In 1993 Gruhn was visiting professor at the University of Monterrey, Mexico. Gruhn supervised over 50 diploma theses and 15 dissertations at the Technical University.

Publication activity

In 1972 Gruhn initiated the development of the textbook series process engineering, whose publication, consisting of 30 volumes, he subsequently co-designed for many years. As an author, he was also directly involved in three volumes. He was also responsible for the publication of the 8-volume series of handbooks for process engineering calculation methods , the individual volumes of which were written by authors from colleges and universities and industry. The aim was to make advanced process engineering methods (also with references to appropriate software) accessible to a wide range of users. Both series have been published in several editions by the Deutsches Verlag für Grundstoffindustrie , Leipzig. Gruhn is also co-author of monographs on the reliability of chemical plants, pipeline planning and the extraction and processing of mineral raw materials. There are over 150 publications in domestic and foreign journals. In addition, reference can be made to extensive lecturing activities in Germany and abroad.

Works (selection)

• For the thermodynamic assessment of irreversible left-hand processes and coupled thermal processes with the help of cycle characteristics. Dresden 1964, DNB 482329408 .
• Investigations into the transport of energy and substances in flat free jets and their applications in ventilation and air conditioning. Dresden 1966, DNB 481366954 .
• Introduction to process engineering. German publishing house for the basic industry, Leipzig 1972, DNB 57297678X .
• Process measurement technology. Dresden 1973, DNB 740143484
• Reaction engineering. German publisher f. Basic industry, Leipzig, DNB 540538760
• Control engineering for process engineers. German publisher f. Basic industry, Leipzig, DNB 550310037
• Energy industry for process engineers. Dresden 1974, DNB 750223227 .
• System process engineering I u. II. German publishing house for basic industry, Leipzig 1976 a. 1978, DNB 550315403 .
• Processes and plants ( process engineering calculation methods. Volume 6). German publishing house for basic industry, Stuttgart 1984, DNB 880352124 .
• Chemical Plant Reliability. German publishing house for basic industry, Leipzig, 1979, DNB 800185544 .
• ABC process engineering. German publishing house for basic industry, Leipzig, 1979, DNB 800195981 .
• The wet mining. Springer Verlag, Berlin / Heidelberg 2008, ISBN 978-3-540-49692-2 .
• Operational Risks in Dredging. Springer Verlag, Berlin / Heidelberg 2016, ISBN 978-3-662-49344-1 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ https://lr-online.trauer.de/todesbeispiel/guenter-gruhn
2. ↑ Dmitry Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia. (No longer available online.) In: www.muctr.ru. Archived from the original on January 9, 2017 ; accessed on January 9, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ^ Staff TU HH - Institute for Process and Plant Engineering. Website of the TU HH. Retrieved January 8, 2017.
4. ↑ Günter Gruhn, Santosh Noronha: Possibilities and limits of mathematical optimization methods of process synthesis . In: Chemical Engineer Technology . tape 70 , no. 7 , July 1, 1998, ISSN  1522-2640 , pp. 842-846 , doi : 10.1002 / cite.330700706 .
5. ↑ Klaus Hartmann: System Process Engineering in: 60 Years of the Merseburg University Campus . Ed .: Hochschule Merseburg 2016. ISBN 978-3-942703-34-5 .
6. ↑ Ernst-Ulrich Hartge, Matthias Pogodda, Claus Reimers, Daniel Schwier, Günter Gruhn, Joachim Werther: Flowsheet Simulation of Solids Processes .

Web links

Commons : Günter Gruhn  - Collection of Images

• Literature by and about Günter Gruhn in the catalog of the German National Library