Herbert Rein

Herbert Rein (born September 14, 1899 in Berlin ; † February 26, 1955 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German industrial chemist, known for the large-scale development of polyacrylonitrile (PAN) as a synthetic fiber.

Rein studied chemistry at the University of Berlin from 1919 and received his doctorate there in 1923. He then worked as a research chemist at Agfa in the Wolfen plant , which also sent him to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin for further training . In 1928 he returned (from 1931 as head of the laboratory for artificial silk of IG Farben , to which Agfa belonged from 1925, in Wolfen) and headed the development of the production of PeCe fibers from polyvinyl chloride . Then he turned to PAN that although it had been discovered in 1930, it could not be released and thus could not be spun from the melt as synthetic fiber.

Rein found a suitable solvent for PAN, first ionic solutions and then in 1941 dimethylformamide (patent 1942), with which he achieved the breakthrough and at the same time refuted the then common view that solvents for polymers had to be low-boiling.

At the end of the Second World War he went to the artificial silk factory in Bobingen near Augsburg and in 1945 he became a trustee of the former IG Farben company Anorgana in Gendorf . He then headed the Neue Augsburger Kattunfabrik and from 1950 he headed the plastics department at Cassella in Frankfurt-Fechenheim , where he built up the production of PAN fibers. This first happened in the USA at DuPont , where the suitability of dimethylformamide as a solvent was independently discovered in 1944 and, after the war, a PAN fiber was produced under the name Orlon. In Germany the PAN fiber came onto the market in 1954 as Dralon .

literature

• Winfried R. Pötsch (lead), Annelore Fischer, Wolfgang Müller: Lexicon of important chemists , Harri Deutsch 1989, p. 359

Web links

• Chemistry friends Erkner