Vladimir Haensel

Vladimir Haensel (born September 1, 1914 in Freiburg im Breisgau ; † December 15, 2002 ) was an American chemical engineer.

He was the son of the Russian economist Paul Haensel (1878-1949) and grew up in Moscow, where his father was a professor. In 1930 he came with his father to the United States and studied at Northwestern University , where his father was a professor, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology chemical engineering with a master's degree in 1937. He then worked for Universal Oil Products (UOP) and received his doctorate in 1941 from Northwestern University in Chemistry. After the Second World War he evaluated German research in synthetic gasoline on behalf of the government. In 1969 he became Vice President and Director of Research at UOP, and from 1972 to 1979 he was Vice President of Science and Technology, and in 1980 he became a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst .

He is the inventor of the platform process in petroleum refining (Platinum catalytic process for reforming petroleum hydrocarbons into gasoline), a process of catalytic reforming . His main finding was that you could only use the expensive platinum in relatively small quantities bound to surfaces to increase the octane number of gasoline. His surface catalysts were also used in the chemical industry. At UOP, he also led the development of catalytic converters .

He held over 145 US patents.

In 1968 he received the National Medal of Science and in 1981 the first National Academy of Sciences Award for Chemistry in Service to Society . In 1952 he received the ACS Prize in Petrochemicals , he received the Perkin Medal and in 1997 the Charles Stark Draper Prize . He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering . In 1965 he received the EV Murphree Award in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry .

Web links

• Biography, National Academy of Sciences (PDF; 370 kB)
• Literature by and about Vladimir Haensel in the bibliographic database WorldCat