Mikhail Pavlov

Born Jan. 9 (21), 1863, in the village of Bozhii Promysel, now within the city limits of Lenkoran’; died Jan. 10, 1958, in Moscow. Soviet metallurgist. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1932; corresponding member, 1927). Hero of Socialist Labor (1945).

After graduating from the St. Petersburg Institute of Mines in 1885, Pavlov worked as an engineer at metallurgical factories in the Viatka mining region. In his first years as a professional engineer he accomplished the reconstruction of blast and puddling furnaces at the Klimkovka and other factories. His “Investigation of the Smelting Process of Blast Furnaces,” published in Gornyi zhurnal in 1894, was the first Russian theoretical study of the heat balance of blast furnaces that use charcoal. While working in the Sulin factory from 1896 to 1900, he adopted and developed the use of anthracite in blast-furnace smelting.

In 1900, Pavlov began his teaching career in the Ekaterinoslav Higher School of Mining (now the Dnepropetrovsk Mining Institute). From 1904 to 1941 he was a professor at the St. Petersburg (Leningrad) Polytechnic Institute. Simultaneously, he was a professor at the Moscow Mining Academy from 1921 to 1930 and at the Moscow Institute of Steel from 1930 to 1941.

In the years before the Revolution, Pavlov produced a number of important works: Design Atlas for Blast Furnace Production (1902), Determination of Blast Furnace Dimensions (1910), Heat Balances of Metallurgical Processes (1911), and Calculation of Blast Furnace Charges (1914). He was a contributor to scientific journals and was the editor of Zhurnal Russkogo metallurgicheskogo obshchestva from its inception in 1910.

Pavlov was particularly active in the years of Soviet power. He took part in the planning of large metallurgical factories, blast furnaces, and steel-smelting plants. Considerable attention was devoted by him to an expansion of the iron-ore and fuel resources for metallurgical production; for example, he headed experimental studies of the use of peat for blast-furnace smelting. In addition, he worked on the smelting of cast iron from the Ural titanomagnetites and from naturally alloyed ores of the Khalilov region. Pavlov directed work on the sintering and dressing of low-grade iron ores and accomplished the first smeltings with fluxed sinter. He made important contributions to the introduction of oxygen blasting into metallurgy.

Pavlov is the author of many textbooks on metallurgy, including the basic manual The Metallurgy of Cast Iron.

Pavlov received the State Prize in 1943 and 1947. He was awarded the Order of Lenin five times, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, and several medals.