Grum-Grzhimailo, Vladimir Efimovich

(also V. E. Grumm-Grzhimailo). Born Feb. 12 (24), 1864, in St. Petersburg; died Oct. 30, 1928, in Moscow. Soviet metallurgist. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1927). Brother of G. E. Grumm-Grzhimailo. Born into the family of an economist.

Upon graduating from the St. Petersburg Institute of Mines in 1885, Grum-Grzhimailo worked in metallurgical plants in the Urals. From 1907 he was an adjunct professor and from 1911 to 1918 professor ordinarius at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute. He subsequently worked as a professor at the Urals Institute of Mines until 1924. In the last years of his life, Grum-Grzhimailo worked (beginning in 1924) on designing metallurgical and other factory furnaces, having created the Bureau of Metallurgical and Heat Engineering Designs in Moscow.

Grum-Grzhimailo proved the economic feasibility of the so-called Russian Bessemer process and gave it the proper theoretical foundation, demonstrating that owing to superheating, the combustion of carbon in pig iron begins in the first minutes of blowing (in the British type of Bessemer process, the carbon burns only after the silicon and manganese have burnt out). In 1908 he was the first to apply the laws of physical chemistry (the law on the dependence of the state of equilibrium of a system on temperature and the law of mass action) to explain the processes occurring in a Bessemer converter and in the steel bath of an open-hearth furnace.

In 1910, Grum-Grzhimailo proposed a design for rever-beratory furnaces, applying the laws of hydraulics to the motion of furnace gases. Studying the properties of refractory materials, particularly of dinas brick, Grum-Grzhimailo created the theory of dinas brick regeneration, which to this day still serves as the basis for the technology of processing it. In his work Rolling and Groove Designing, he for the first time scientifically explained the methods of grooving rollers, kept a secret by the old masters. This book marked the beginning of the theoretical study of groove designing.

Various soaking pit furnaces were designed under Grum-Grzhimailo’s guidance: continuous furnaces for heating bars before rolling, forge furnaces for heat-treating metals, and drying, annealing, and open-hearth furnaces.