- Email: [email protected]
Yuri and high temperature water
Journal of Molecular Liquids 239 (2017) 3–4
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Molecular Liquids journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/molliq
Preface
Yuri and high temperature water
There are very few scientists or people of any sort whose pictures hang in my office. But I do have the picture of Yuri Evegenievich (Fig. 1) hanging in my office, looking at me as I work to remind me all the time of the scientific standards that I try to maintain. It was a very sad day for me when I received a copy of a Russian scientific journal (Supercritical Fluids Theory & Practice) which contained the obituary of one of my close friends and collaborators, Professor Yuri Gorbaty. He was an excellent scientist who has been a great friend of me and my students here in Nottingham. But let me explain what he did. He was born in Chechnya before the Second World War and then moved to Moscow. He used to tell me about how he had gone to Red Square in Moscow the day that Stalin died in 1953. Then, for the last 40 years, he has worked in an institute in a town called Chernogolovka quite near Moscow, the Institute of Experimental Mineralogy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. That is making minerals and, because he was interested in how minerals were formed, he was very interested in the properties of high temperature water.
Yuri was the sort of scientist who is called a spectroscopist. He was interested in the absorption of light by substances and particularly he studied the absorption of infrared light by water. The idea of his experiments was to try and understand how the nature of water changes when it is under very high temperature and pressure such as you find deep underground where minerals are being formed. It's really hard to do experiments at high temperature and pressure and Yuri was probably one of the leading scientists in the world for studying water under these conditions. Let me explain the problem. The problem is that, if you are studying the absorption of infrared light by water, it absorbs the infrared light very strongly. So you need an extremely thin layer of water, much thinner than one of my hairs. So you need to have two transparent windows that are very close together and are at very high temperature and very high pressure. This here is one of the cells that Yuri built and gave to us in Nottingham. It consists of a heated cell and a tube through which the water is pumped in, under high pressure. The light enters the cell at one end of the cell and it comes out through a hole at another end. What is miraculous
Fig. 1. Yuri E. Gorbaty at the Supercritical Fluid conference in Suzdal, September 2009.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.molliq.2017.05.072 0167-7322/© 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V.
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Preface
Fig. 2. Yuri Gorbaty (left) in his lab in Chernogolovka in March 2004 with Vladimir K. Popov, Viktor N. Bagratashvili and Yuri's long time colleague Galina V. Bondarenko.
about this cell is that, even when it is at high temperature of 500 °C and a pressure of 1500 atm. - extraordinarily harsh conditions - you can move one window relative to the other. You can do this by turning a screw here which moves the arm of the cell backwards and forwards. Since the pressure is so high, if you were to use ordinary metal, it would just bend because you're pushing so hard with the windows. But Yuri used a special Soviet alloy that was made before the fall of Communism in 1991 and is no longer produced. The alloy is so strong that it can move the windows against the pressure without bending. This cell was used by generations of students in my lab who worked with Yuri. What he did was to arrive in Nottingham and inspire my students. He became their scientific grandfather. They used to write to him when he went back to Russia telling him about their lives, sending him photos of their children when they got married. He was a remarkable person because, although he was Russian, he wrote the most beautiful English. His written English was much better than that of most of my English students. But he had great difficulty in speaking English and so I usually used to speak to him in Russian. My students somehow managed to get along in English. We have seven joint publications [1–7] Yuri represents a dying generation of scientists who were passionate about their science and were fantastically good experimentalists. They could do experiments which nobody else could do. They could design equipment which younger scientists can only dream about. So he was a fantastic role model to my students. To scientists across the world, he had a terrific reputation. I once visited Yuri's lab in Chernogolovka. It was a lovely lab, very Russian. There was a table where you could sit down and have tea (Fig. 2). This is something which is not allowed in UK laboratories but it is really good for stimulating discussions. For me, it has been a real privilege to have known Yuri. His passing a sad loss to Russian science
and to science across the world. We shall all miss him. This special issue is a tribute to him and to his outstanding scientific legacy.
References [1] M. Poliakoff, S.J. Barlow, G.V. Bondarenko, Y.E. Gorbaty, FTIR reaction monitoring in alcohols and water up to 500 degrees C and 1000 bar, Abstr. Pap. Am. Chem. Soc. 220 (2000) U214–U215. [2] S.J. Barlow, G.V. Bondarenko, Y.E. Gorbaty, T. Yamaguchi, M. Poliakoff, An IR study of hydrogen bonding in liquid and supercritical alcohols, J. Phys. Chem. A 106 (2002) 10452–10460. [3] Y.E. Gorbaty, G.V. Bondarenko, E. Venardou, E. Garcia-Verdugo, M. Sokolova, J. Ke, M. Poliakoff, High-pressure high-temperature Raman spectroscopy of liquid and supercritical fluids, Appl. Spectrosc. 57 (2003) 1300–1303. [4] Y.E. Gorbaty, E. Venardou, E. Garcia-Verdugo, M. Poliakoff, High-temperature and high-pressure cell for kinetic measurements of supercritical fluids reactions with the use of ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy, Rev. Sci. Instrum. 74 (2003) 3073–3076. [5] Y.E. Gorbaty, G.V. Bondarenko, E. Venardou, S.J. Barlow, E. Garcia-Verdugo, M. Poliakoff, Experimental spectroscopic high-temperature high-pressure techniques for studying liquid and supercritical fluids, Vib. Spectrosc. 35 (2004) 97–101. [6] E. Venardou, E. Garcia-Verdugo, S.J. Barlow, Y.E. Gorbaty, M. Poliakoff, On-line monitoring of the hydrolysis of acetonitrile in near-critical water using Raman spectroscopy, Vib. Spectrosc. 35 (2004) 103–109. [7] M. Sokolova, S.J. Barlow, G.V. Bondarenko, Y.E. Gorbaty, M. Poliakoff, Comparison between IR absorption and Raman scattering spectra of liquid and supercritical 1-butanol, J. Phys. Chem. A 110 (2006) 3882–3885.
Martyn Poliakoff The School of Chemistry, The University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK E-mail address: [email protected].
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Molecular Liquids journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/molliq
Preface
Yuri and high temperature water
There are very few scientists or people of any sort whose pictures hang in my office. But I do have the picture of Yuri Evegenievich (Fig. 1) hanging in my office, looking at me as I work to remind me all the time of the scientific standards that I try to maintain. It was a very sad day for me when I received a copy of a Russian scientific journal (Supercritical Fluids Theory & Practice) which contained the obituary of one of my close friends and collaborators, Professor Yuri Gorbaty. He was an excellent scientist who has been a great friend of me and my students here in Nottingham. But let me explain what he did. He was born in Chechnya before the Second World War and then moved to Moscow. He used to tell me about how he had gone to Red Square in Moscow the day that Stalin died in 1953. Then, for the last 40 years, he has worked in an institute in a town called Chernogolovka quite near Moscow, the Institute of Experimental Mineralogy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. That is making minerals and, because he was interested in how minerals were formed, he was very interested in the properties of high temperature water.
Yuri was the sort of scientist who is called a spectroscopist. He was interested in the absorption of light by substances and particularly he studied the absorption of infrared light by water. The idea of his experiments was to try and understand how the nature of water changes when it is under very high temperature and pressure such as you find deep underground where minerals are being formed. It's really hard to do experiments at high temperature and pressure and Yuri was probably one of the leading scientists in the world for studying water under these conditions. Let me explain the problem. The problem is that, if you are studying the absorption of infrared light by water, it absorbs the infrared light very strongly. So you need an extremely thin layer of water, much thinner than one of my hairs. So you need to have two transparent windows that are very close together and are at very high temperature and very high pressure. This here is one of the cells that Yuri built and gave to us in Nottingham. It consists of a heated cell and a tube through which the water is pumped in, under high pressure. The light enters the cell at one end of the cell and it comes out through a hole at another end. What is miraculous
Fig. 1. Yuri E. Gorbaty at the Supercritical Fluid conference in Suzdal, September 2009.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.molliq.2017.05.072 0167-7322/© 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V.
4
Preface
Fig. 2. Yuri Gorbaty (left) in his lab in Chernogolovka in March 2004 with Vladimir K. Popov, Viktor N. Bagratashvili and Yuri's long time colleague Galina V. Bondarenko.
about this cell is that, even when it is at high temperature of 500 °C and a pressure of 1500 atm. - extraordinarily harsh conditions - you can move one window relative to the other. You can do this by turning a screw here which moves the arm of the cell backwards and forwards. Since the pressure is so high, if you were to use ordinary metal, it would just bend because you're pushing so hard with the windows. But Yuri used a special Soviet alloy that was made before the fall of Communism in 1991 and is no longer produced. The alloy is so strong that it can move the windows against the pressure without bending. This cell was used by generations of students in my lab who worked with Yuri. What he did was to arrive in Nottingham and inspire my students. He became their scientific grandfather. They used to write to him when he went back to Russia telling him about their lives, sending him photos of their children when they got married. He was a remarkable person because, although he was Russian, he wrote the most beautiful English. His written English was much better than that of most of my English students. But he had great difficulty in speaking English and so I usually used to speak to him in Russian. My students somehow managed to get along in English. We have seven joint publications [1–7] Yuri represents a dying generation of scientists who were passionate about their science and were fantastically good experimentalists. They could do experiments which nobody else could do. They could design equipment which younger scientists can only dream about. So he was a fantastic role model to my students. To scientists across the world, he had a terrific reputation. I once visited Yuri's lab in Chernogolovka. It was a lovely lab, very Russian. There was a table where you could sit down and have tea (Fig. 2). This is something which is not allowed in UK laboratories but it is really good for stimulating discussions. For me, it has been a real privilege to have known Yuri. His passing a sad loss to Russian science
and to science across the world. We shall all miss him. This special issue is a tribute to him and to his outstanding scientific legacy.
References [1] M. Poliakoff, S.J. Barlow, G.V. Bondarenko, Y.E. Gorbaty, FTIR reaction monitoring in alcohols and water up to 500 degrees C and 1000 bar, Abstr. Pap. Am. Chem. Soc. 220 (2000) U214–U215. [2] S.J. Barlow, G.V. Bondarenko, Y.E. Gorbaty, T. Yamaguchi, M. Poliakoff, An IR study of hydrogen bonding in liquid and supercritical alcohols, J. Phys. Chem. A 106 (2002) 10452–10460. [3] Y.E. Gorbaty, G.V. Bondarenko, E. Venardou, E. Garcia-Verdugo, M. Sokolova, J. Ke, M. Poliakoff, High-pressure high-temperature Raman spectroscopy of liquid and supercritical fluids, Appl. Spectrosc. 57 (2003) 1300–1303. [4] Y.E. Gorbaty, E. Venardou, E. Garcia-Verdugo, M. Poliakoff, High-temperature and high-pressure cell for kinetic measurements of supercritical fluids reactions with the use of ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy, Rev. Sci. Instrum. 74 (2003) 3073–3076. [5] Y.E. Gorbaty, G.V. Bondarenko, E. Venardou, S.J. Barlow, E. Garcia-Verdugo, M. Poliakoff, Experimental spectroscopic high-temperature high-pressure techniques for studying liquid and supercritical fluids, Vib. Spectrosc. 35 (2004) 97–101. [6] E. Venardou, E. Garcia-Verdugo, S.J. Barlow, Y.E. Gorbaty, M. Poliakoff, On-line monitoring of the hydrolysis of acetonitrile in near-critical water using Raman spectroscopy, Vib. Spectrosc. 35 (2004) 103–109. [7] M. Sokolova, S.J. Barlow, G.V. Bondarenko, Y.E. Gorbaty, M. Poliakoff, Comparison between IR absorption and Raman scattering spectra of liquid and supercritical 1-butanol, J. Phys. Chem. A 110 (2006) 3882–3885.
Martyn Poliakoff The School of Chemistry, The University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK E-mail address: [email protected].