Helmut Pichler (chemist)

Helmut Pichler (born July 13, 1904 in Hinterbrühl , † October 13, 1974 in Karlsruhe ) was an Austrian - German chemist . He made significant contributions in the field of technical chemistry , especially coal chemistry .

Life

Early years

Helmut Pichler came to Hinterbrühl near Vienna in 1904 as the son of bank clerk Rudolf Pichler and his wife Martha Pichler nee. Knight to the world. In 1923 he began to study chemistry in Vienna. From 1927 he did his doctoral thesis in Germany at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim an der Ruhr with Franz Fischer . With his thesis on the synthesis of hydrocarbons he received his doctorate in Vienna in 1929.

After graduation: Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Coal Research

After completing his doctorate, Pichler stayed at the KWI for Coal Research for a few years, where he initially held an assistant position. In 1933 he joined the NSDAP and the SA , in 1934 he became a German citizen. After Otto Roelen left the institute in October 1934, Pichler headed the test facility for the technical-industrial implementation of the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis . In 1936 he became a department head at his institute.

A habilitation aimed at by Pichler at the University of Münster was denied to him despite joining the NSDAP and SA and being naturalized for political as well as professional reasons - his field of work was too close to that of Fischer. An appointment Pichler to the German Technical University in Prague in 1942 was prevented by Fischer. His attempts to make Pichler his successor as head of the Institute for Coal Research failed, however. Fischer also did not succeed in having Pichler appointed as a scientific member of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society or in arranging for him an honorary professorship .

After the Second World War

In 1946 Helmut Pichler moved to the United States , where he worked as a consultant for the US Department of Defense and the United States Bureau of Mines , the main US agency for research into the extraction and exploitation of natural resources .

Pichler became an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research , headed by Karl Ziegler , the former Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.

In 1956 he returned to Germany, where he took over the professorship for gas technology and fuel utilization at the Technical University of Karlsruhe as the successor to Ernst Terres .

After the war he was also a consultant for the South African company Sasol , which used the Fischer-Tropsch process.

family

In 1934 Helmut Pichler married Luise Maria Kleinen, born in 1903, daughter of the auditor Hermann Kleinen and his wife Anna Schmitz. Pichler and his wife had a son and two daughters.

Services

During his doctoral thesis in 1928, Pichler and Fischer developed a process for the synthesis of benzene from methane . In 1930 the partial combustion of methane to acetylene was added. However, due to the global economic crisis and new discoveries of mineral oil deposits, these processes did not achieve the industrial importance that was initially attributed to them.

In the mid-1930s, Pichler, again together with Fischer, developed medium-pressure synthesis for the production of higher hydrocarbons at pressures of 5 to 20 bar using the Fischer-Tropsch process . In the NS state , which was striving for self-sufficiency in the field of fuel production , medium pressure synthesis was transferred to industrial application before the process was fully developed. 1938 developed Pichler the synthesis of high molecular paraffin hydrocarbons to Ruthenium - catalysts , 1941 Karl-Heinz Ziesecke the synthesis of branched hydrocarbons on oxide catalysts under high pressure, the so-called iso-synthesis .

During his work in the USA he was involved in the introduction of a variant of the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis based on natural gas , the so-called Hydrocol process , in an industrial plant in Brownsville (Texas) .

After taking up his professorship in Karlsruhe, he set up the new Institute for Gas Technology, Combustion Technology and Water Chemistry, which was ready for occupancy in 1962. Pichler was also instrumental in founding the Faculty of Chemical Engineering. Under his direction, numerous application-related topics relating to hydrocarbons were worked on, such as their synthesis and splitting, coal refining , mineral oil refining , the production of town gas or gas chromatography .

Memberships, honors and awards

In 1944 Pichler was awarded the War Merit Cross 2nd Class.

In 1969 the German Scientific Society for Petroleum, Natural Gas and Coal (DGMK) awarded Helmut Pichler the Carl Engler Medal . A year later he received the Bunsen-Pettenkofer Honor Roll from the German Gas and Water Association (DVGW). Also in 1970 the University of Potchefstroom in South Africa awarded him an honorary doctorate.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l} Manfred Rasch :  Pichler, Helmut. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 20, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-428-00201-6 , p. 415 f. ( Digitized version ).