Otto Schönherr (chemist)

Otto Schönherr (born December 1, 1861 in Chemnitz , † December 25, 1926 in Dresden ) was a German chemist.

Schönherr studied chemistry at the TH Dresden from 1880 to 1884 and then worked in the fertilizer industry, first as a laboratory chemist at Merck and Co. in Hamburg, then as manager of a fertilizer factory in Vienenburg near Goslar and in Oker as well as in Ludwigshafen (part of Silbermann from Augsburg ). In 1894/95 he studied electrochemistry in Giessen and received his doctorate in 1895. Also in 1895 he built an electrochemical chlorate factory in Turgi, Switzerland, and in 1896 the alkali chloride electrolysis plant at BASF .

In 1905 he found a process for the extraction of nitrogen from the air similar to the Birkeland-Eyde process by Kristian Birkeland . He had been working on it since 1899 and had it patented. Because of the high energy consumption, production was only feasible with hydropower and BASF worked on this with Norsk Hydro in Norway (who owned the Birkeland-Eyde patents). The factory in Notodden , which was operational in 1912 , was managed for a short time by Schönherr before he retired in 1912 for health reasons. At that time, however, with the development of the Haber-Bosch process, more favorable competition for ammonia synthesis was becoming apparent.

In 1908 he was awarded the Liebig Memorial Medal.

literature

• Winfried Pötsch, Annelore Fischer, Wolfgang Fischer: Lexicon of important chemists, Harri Deutsch 1989