Mikhail Stepanovich Vrevskii

Born Jan. 31 (Feb. 12), 1871, in the village of Golubovo, Pskov Province; died May 29, 1929, in Leningrad. Soviet physical chemist. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1929).

Vrevskii graduated from the University of St. Petersburg in 18%; he was a student of D. P. Konovalov and his assistant from 1897. In 1913 he became a professor at the University of St. Petersburg, where he founded a physical chemistry laboratory. From 1924 to 1927 he participated in the work of the commission of the Main Office of Weights and Measures on compiling alcoholometry tables. He established a number of important relationships between temperature, the composition of the vapor of solutions, and the partial pressures of the components of a solution and between temperature and the vapor composition of azeotropic mixtures (1911). Vrevskii snowed that heating a system at constant volume causes, in the phase arising with the absorption of heat, an increase in the concentration of the component whose transfer absorbs most of the heat (the N. N. Zinin and A. A. Voskresenskii Prize). Vrevskii investigated the dependence of heat capacity, the heats of formation, and the vapor pressure of aqueous solutions of NH₃, HC1, and HBr on temperature (1916). In 1927 he published with B. P. Nikol’skii a new method they had developed for determining the latent heats of evaporation of solutions at constant temperature and proposed a new method for determining partial vapor pressure and the degree of dissociation in vapors of solutions containing molecules of an associated component. He was awarded the Lenin Prize.