Lavrov, Aleksandr

Born Apr. 24 (May 6), 1838; died 1904. Russian metallurgist.

Lavrov was the son of an impoverished noble in the province of Tver. After graduating in 1859 from the Mikhail Artillery Academy, he studied for two years at the Mining Institute. In 1861 he was assigned to the steel cannon factory in Zlatoust, where he began a study of steel gun-barrel production. In 1866 he suggested that steel is a solid solution of carbon in iron. In the same year, he discovered (jointly with N. V. Kalakutskii) the phenomenon of liquation in steel and established its relationship to the dimensions of the ingot. Describing the process by which blowholes and pipes form in an ingot and determining the laws of their distribution, he was able to propose a more efficient mold design. In 1875 he became the director of the Gatchina foundry. In 1891 he became the first in the world to use aluminum as a deoxidizer in smelting steel for casting intricate shapes and to propose the use of thermite powder for heating the steel in the molds.