Dmitrii Konovalov

Born Mar. 10 (22), 1856, in the village of Ivanovtsy, now in Dnepropetrovsk Oblast; died Jan. 6, 1929, in Leningrad. Soviet chemist. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1923; corresponding member, 1921).

After graduating from the Institute of Mines (1878), Konovalov audited courses at the University of St. Petersburg, where he studied chemistry under A. M. Butlerov and D. I. Mendeleev. In 1882 he was appointed assistant at the university; from 1886 to 1907 he was a professor there. From 1908 to 1915 he was deputy minister of trade and industry. He was a professor at the Petrograd Institute of Technology from 1916 to 1918 and director of the Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Power Engineering in Dnepropetrovsk from 1919 to 1922. He took part in the restoration of the chemical industry in the Ukraine. From 1922 he was president of the Central Board of Weights and Measures and professor at the Petrograd Institute of Technology.

The well-known Konovalov rules are set forth in his master’s dissertation, The Vapor Pressures of Solutions (1884; 3rd ed., 1928). Konovalov’s doctoral thesis, The Role of Contact Effects in Dissociation Phenomena (1885), in which he first introduced the concept of an active surface, was of great significance to the development of the theory on heterogeneous catalysis and chemical kinetics. Konovalov investigated the relationship between the heat of combustion and the structure of organic com-pounds. He also conducted research in industrial chemistry. Beginning in 1923, he held the office of president of the Russian Physicochemical Society for several terms (from 1922 he was chairman of the society’s chemistry section).