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R. Agladze

The formation and development of a number of leading trends in chemical science and technology in former Soviet Union are closely connected with the name of Acad. Rafael Agladze. He master-minded the organization of many scientific, educational and industrial centers.

R Agladze is the author of fundamental and applied studies in metallurgy, hydro electrometallurgy, inorganic electro synthesis, corrosion, materials for energy sources, electrolysis of ionic melts and electro deposition of metals and alloys. The scientist gained international recognition for his works on manganese electrochemistry.

Agladze was born on December 29, 1911 in Tbilisi. His father, Ilia Agladze, a well known writer, assayist, journalist and translator worked in 1894-1902 on the editorial staff of the ‘’Iveria’’ magazine, published by Ilia Chavchavadze, classic of Georgian literature and outstanding public figure. In 1911, being an editor and publisher of the ‘’Droeba’’ magazine, he was arrested and exiled from Georgia for a number of publications and activities directed against the autocracy. His wife Olga Bezhanishvili, who avtively contributed to newspapers and magazines and worked also for the Society for the Spread of Literacy among Georgians, followed her husband together with her young children. The family returned to Georgia only in 1918, following the declaration of the independence of Georgia.

At first Agladze studied at the1st Tbilisi experimental-model school, well known for its humanitarian traditions. However, later, at his father’s advice, Agladze went to study in a newly opened Chemical technical school.

The work of well known chemists P.Melikishvili, V.Petriashvili G. Nikoladze, L Pisarzhevsky exerted a significant influence on Agladze’s professional choice. In one of his memoirs Agladze mentioned their lectures and seminars with gratitude.

At the age of seventeen, Agladze already worked as a technician-chemist at Donbas Chemical-recovery carbonization factory. In 1929 he entered chemical faculty of the Georgian Industrial Institute. While a student, in 1932-1934 he worked as a head of the military-chemical laboratory. His first published papers on the production and use of chlorine belong to that period.

After graduation from the institute Agladze served for two years (1934-1935) as an engineer attracted attention of Prof.P. Lukyanov, a well known scientist, head of the Chair of Electrochemical Engineering at the Moscow D.I. Mendeleev Chemico-technological Institute, who suggested that Agladze should take post-graduate course.

In1935-1938 he was post-graduate and lecturer at the cited Institute. At that time his scientific interests were consentrated om the solution of the problem of deposition of manganese by electrolysis of aqueous solutions. High reactivity of this element did not permit to solve this problem in asimple way and demanded the elaboration of non-standard approaches. Basing on the results of the kinetic studies of cathodic process of abtaining metallic manganese by electrolysis of sulfat ammonia electrolytes. The young scientist displayed the talent of an angineer by working out the complete technological cycle of leaching of manganese from oxide ores.

Agladze’s candidates thesis on “Electrolysis of Manganese Salts’’ (1938), his patents and scientific papers on the hydroelectrometallurgy and electrocrystallization of manganese published in the journals “Metallurgist’’ and “Mining Journal”, Proceedings of the Georgian Academy of Sciences as well as in the transactions of the Moscow Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology-all these have been recognized as basic studies in the field.

In 1939 Agladze was appointed assistant professor at the Mendeleev ICT. At the same time he worked for his doctor’s degree at the institute of metallurgy, Acad. Sci. USSR. His educational activities began from this period.

In 1939-1940 as a result of his numerous investigations, Agladze determined the possibility of a drastic improvement of service properties of special steels and alloys through increasing the purity of the alloying element, i.e. manganese. the experimental batches of electrolytic manganese. the experimental batches of electrolytic manganese. The experimental batches of electrolytic manganese, produced by Agladze, were subject to rigorous tests at leading metallurgical laboratories and plants of the country. The tests revealed the favorable effect of this component on rollability of steel. In the tense international situacion, work on producing pure manganese acquired not only a major national-economic but also defense significance. At the beginning of the Second World War necessity arose of the transfer of the worked out technology to large scale production. For this purpose in 1941 Agladze was sent by the government to the Zestafoni Plant of Ferroalloys in Georgia. Within a short period of time, he personally collected at Tbilisi enterprises various necessary equipment, transformers, power rectifiers, copper bars, etc, Travelling on train with his machinery, Agladze arrived in Zestafoni where in several weeks he managed to assemble (in the building of a plant dining room) an electrochemical shop-absolutely new for the local pyrometallurgical plant. For testing and putting the shop into operaton local men power resources were urgently mobilized: famed masters of clay ware manufacture from the village of Shrosha made acid-resistant reservoirs; vessels brought from wineries were converted into electrolyzers, etc. The servicing personnel was trained under his direct guidance at local industial shcool.

Under industrial conditions, Agladze developed the process of joint reductional leaching of oxide ores and ferromanganese. Within a very short period of time, till the end of 1941, he produced the first tones of electrolytic metallic manganese of 99,7 per cent purity, which were sent by air to the Urals Metallurgical Plant for experimental smelting. From the beginning of 1942 the new metal was introduced into large scale production of special and alloys. It should be noted, that in the hard year of 1942 the shop of electrolytic manganese at the Zestafoni factory of ferroalloys was the winner in the competition among the factories of ferrous metallurgy of the awarded the State Prize of the USSR.

In 1943 at the meeting in Moscow of the academic council of Institute of metallurgy, Acad. Sci. USSR Agladze successfully defended his doctoral thesis on “Hydroelectrometallurgical production of Manganese “.His official opponent A. N. Frumkin, an outstanding electrochemist of our times called Agladze work a major achievement of applied electrochemistry.

According to him, its significance lay not only in the production of metallic manganese, but also in its opening up fresh opportunities in the production of manganese dioxide for chemical industry and in leaching other non-ferrous metals from manganese ores His second opponent A. N. Kapustinsky, Cor. Member, USSR Acad. Sci. called this work ideal doctoral theses.

At the same time Agladze organizes new scientific centers at the Academy of Sciences and at the Georgian Polytechnical Institute. His subsequent scientific, research and educational work was conducted at these two institutions.

In 1942, Agladze set up an electrochemical laboratory a the Institute of Chemistry, Acad. Sci. USSR, in which he carried on extensive work aimed at: a) ascertaining the possibility of producing electrolytic alloys of iron with manganese, zinc and cobalt, and studying their physico-chemical properties, b) producing manganese amalgam, and c) electrochemical deposition of manganese from cyanic solutions. Taking into account the requirements of the war time the laboratory conducted specific researches developing explosive mixtures, gopkalit for gas masks, etc.

In 1943 Agladze was appointed head of the Metallurgical sector of the Institute of Chemistry, Georgian Acad. Sci. and in the same year organized a Chair of Electrochemical Engineering at the Georgian Polytechnical Institute (which he headed till 1985). More than 1000 specialists have graduated from this chair-among them many directors of large enterprises, candidates and doctors of science. Agladze was endowed with pedagogical talent: he could carry away his students and easily established contacts with the audience. He instilled interest for and future colleagues.

That was the period of the formation of the Georgian electrochemical school and of the inception of its main trends. Agladze rallied gifted young scientists and students, allotted a concrete sphere of research to each of them. Wide-scale research work involved, in particular, a) the production of manganese and its alloys through electrolysis, b) hydroelectrometalutgy of nickel a and cobalt from the slimes of electrolytic manganese production, c) production of active manganese dioxide and of manganese current sources, d) electrosynthesis of various manganates and permanganates, etc. In that period Agladze spared no effort in setting up the first technical institute at the Academy of Sciences of Georgia-The Institute of Metal and Mining; Agladze was appointed its first director in 1945. On the basis of this Institute major scientific centers were organized later: the Institutes of Mining, Mechanical Engineering, Metallurgy, Machine Mechanics, Building Materials, Applied (later Inorganic) Chemistry and Electrochemistry. The latter was headed by Agladze from the time of its foundation in 1956.

In December 1946 the 35 year-old scientist was elected member of Academy of Sciences of Georgia, and in the next year, its vice-president. Although the Academy of Sciences of Georgia was set up in 1941 it was only in the first years after the war that in became possible to organize most of the institutes, staff them, provide with buildings, equipment, etc. All this was given top priority in Agladze work.

As a Vice-president and a member of Presidium of the Academy of Sciences Agladze in close contact with such leading figures of Georgia science as mathematicians N. I. Muskhelishhvili (President), end I. N. Vekua (Academician-Secretary), the historian S. N. Janashia (Vice-president) and the linguist A. G. Shanidze (Vice-president) governed the technical progress in the Republic.

In 1949 on his initiative a popular scientific journal was founded-“metsniereba da teknika” (“Science and Engineering”), himself being its first editor. Agladze took an active part in compiling and publishing the Georgian dictionary of metallurgical terminology, was a member of the editorial board of the Russian-Georgian Engineering terminology, active member of the Republican Board of the D. I. Mendeleev Chemical Society, member of the “Tsodna”(“Knowledge”) Society, etc.

In 1960-1961 several laboratories separated from the Department of Electrochemistry and Electrometallurgy, viz. the laboratories of the chemical energy sources, rare elements and their technology electrolysis of melted media, analytical chemistry which in their turn served as the basis for a number of new laboratories. At the end of the 1960s a laboratory of electrocrystallization, as a new sub department, separated from the Department of Electrochemistry and electrometallurgy.

Despite these reorganizations, the basic laboratory is the one of Electrochemistry and Electrometallurgy, which was headed by Agladze till his death and which continues to function fruitfully at present, developing main scientific interests of its founder in the sphere of the Electrochemistry of manganese and its compounds.

The active organizational and public work in the 1940s-1950s did not divorce Agladze from practical work. In 1953-1956 he tested on industrial scale an original method of electrosynthesis of potassium permanganate. In connection with this he worked as the chief engineer of the project at the State Institute of Applied Chemistry in Leningrad.

In 1958 a new large shop of electrolytic manganese was put into operation at the Zestafoni plant of ferroalloys, the author of the technology being the chief engineer of the project. In a short period of time both factories were successfully operating. At that time Agladze worked as Academician-secretary of the Department of Technical sciences at the Georgian Academy of Sciences, director of the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry and Electrochemistry and Head of the Chair of Electrochemical Engineering at the Georgian Polytechnical Institute. Although Agladze was always swamped with work, he regularly organized excursions and trips to different regions of Georgia and beyond its borders. Collaborators at the Institute and the Chair, as well as generations of students, recall these excursions with pleasure and gratitude.

In connection with the construction of the caprolactam factory at the Rustavi Chemical Integrated Works, Agladze and his collaborators proposed a new electrochemical method of synthesis of hydroxylamine salts. This work served as the basis for the development of fundamental research into the chemistry and electrochemistry of nitrogen compounds at the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry and electrochemistry. In mid 1960s the scientist set up another scientific center at the Georgian Polytechnical Institute, a basic research laboratory of super pure manganese and its compounds. In this laboratory under Agladze guidance experienced specialists, post graduates and students conducted scientific investigations and design studies in electrochemical technology and engineering.

From the start the laboratory conducted extensive research on a) production of plastic manganese of g-modification, b) refining manganese from melted media, c) unification in one electrolyzer of the processes of deposition of EMD on the anode of metallic manganese on the cathode in the presence of selenium containing agents in the electrolyte, d) complex processing of Chiatura manganese and Madneuli cooper concentrantes with simultaneous production in the electrolyzer of manganese dioxide at the anode and cooper at the cathode.

Early studies on manganese alloys published by Agladze and co-workers in 1954 in the collection “The manganese alloys with cooper, nickel and zinc” developed later in the creation of manganese sacrifice electrodes, which were successfully tested in marine conditions.

Many studies of Agladze are based on the idea of simultaneous utilization of the cathode and anode currents as well on the transfer from plane electrodes to three-dimensional ones.

An electrolyzer with three-dimensional bipolar electrodes and the method of electrolysis, developed by Agladze and his collaborators in the early 1970s with a view to producing potassium permanganate, was one of the first examples of conducting an electrochemical process not only on the surface of plane-parallel electrodes but in the entire volume of the electrolyzer, this bringing its capacity to that of powerful chemical reactors.

The scientist spent many a night at the factory when testing an original reactor with spread bipolar electrodes, which simplified the technological cycle of production of potassium permanganate by eliminating a number of labor-consuming operations. One electrolizer of the new type was capable of replacing 15 traditional baths in capacity. The development of the progressive technology permitted the use of three-dimensional electrodes in processes of production of chlorooxygen and some organic compounds as well as for purification of natural and sewage water, etc.

The investigation of bipolar behavior of metallic electrodes in electric field developed in the creation of original device for prediction of corrosion behavior of metallic materials by in situ analysis of potential distribution at the charged metal surfaces. Licenses for the device have been purchased by Germany, Japan and Switzerland.

Agladze conducted work on the production of ferric materials by electrolysis providing for co-precipitation of hydroxides of various metals after anodic dissolution with subsequent heat treatment of the precipitates. The conditions of production of poly-and mono ferrites and their physico-chemical properties are thoroughly studied.

Agladze study of wear-resistant electrode materials for the synthesis of electrolytic manganese dioxide is also a significant line of study. Fundamental studies of electrophysical and corrosion properties of titanium-manganese alloys allowed to work out an effective dimensionally stable and wear resistant anodic materials for electrosynthesis of EMD. At present, 90 per cent of total EMD production in the Soviet Union is obtained at the titanium-manganese anodes. This work helped to solve a painful problem of passivation of anodes and provided conditions for the energy savings and improvement of the quality of EMD.

The work of Agladze and his pupils in the sphere of production of chromium and its compounds by electrolysis are widely recognized. Already in 1959 a collection “Hidroelectrometallurgy of Chromium” was published.

In the subsequent years a number of technological electrochemical processes were developed for the production of scaly, lamellar and powder-like chromium, chromium acid, chromates and bichromates.

From 1976 till 1987 experimental-industrial tests of the technology of production lamellar and crumblic dendritic chromium were carried out at the Zestafoni plant of ferroalloys and the “Tulachermet” factory. The obtained results served as the basis of the initial data for designing an electrolytic chromium shop at the Ermakovsk factory of Ferroalloys.

Among Agladze numerous published works special mention should be made on the collected papers written under his guidance: “The Electrochemistry of Manganese”. 9 volumes of this collection, published by the “Metsniereba” Publishers in 1957-1989 (250 printer s sheet), are universally recognized as the most competent in this field.

Agladze is the author and co-author of a number of text-books for students, among them “Aluminum” (1974), “Applied Electrochemistry” (1975, 1984), “ Chemical Electrothermia” (1983), “Electrometallurgy of Ionic Melts” (1983). The latter in 1984 was awarded a prize of the Georgian Ministry of Education. In 1975 Agladze together with his pupils was awarded a prize of the Georgian Academy of Sciences for outstanding contribution in the electrochemistry of manganese.

Agladze remained a genuine inventor till his very last. A number of his author s patents were realized after his death. In his advanced age he rejected a role of a patriarch generalizing the achievements of his pupils. Agladze s creative nature goaded him to the solution of new problems. Occasionally, the results of Agladze s research put him in opposition, as it were, to his pupils. However, the uncompromising for the realization of new ideas, inherent in his character, always found like-minded persons among the new generations of his followers. Agladze suffered setbacks too along his creative path, but he was not scared by them.

In the last years of his life the scientist exerted much efforts towards the implementation of another of his innovate ideas purporting to free the manganese industry of Georgia from the shackles of centralizes bureaucratic dictate. In 1984 Agladze developed the conception of setting up an independent concern “Electromanganese”, uniting scientific and educational teams headed by him. Despite his efforts this promising idea failed to materialize under the existing administrative-command system.

As a permanent chairman of the Republican Scientific Council for Electrochemistry and member of the bureau of the Scientific Council for Electrochemistry, Acad. Sci. USSR, Agladze was the organizer of many republican and All-Union conferences; he participated in the meetings of the International Society of Electrochemistry, promoted in every possible way closer contacts of scientists from various countries, and cultivated a sense of genuine internationalism in his students.

A true patriot and citizen, Agladze was shocked by the tragic events of 9 April, 1989 in Tbilisi. A man of striking vital energy survived less than a week the imposition of martial law in his native city. He died on 17 April, 1989.

`Georgian people, embarking on the road of independence and national revival, deeply reveres the memory of its son. The Institute of Inorganic Chemistry and Electrochemistry of the Georgian Academy of Sciences and the chair in the Georgian Technical University, set up by Agladze , as well as the plant of Electrolytic Manganese Dioxide in Rustavi have been named after him. One of the streets in Tbilisi was named after him. His life of a true patriot and scientist is an example for his numerous followers.

A. Avaliani