Prof Dr Jürgen Gmehling, Professor of Technical Chemistry, has been awarded the Emil Kirschbaum Medal. With this award, the ProcessNet board honours Gmehling's outstanding scientific achievements in the development of thermal process engineering.
With his work, Gmehling has put the design of thermal separation processes on a scientifically sound basis and introduced them into industrial practice. The award is named after the German process engineer Emil Kirschbaum and is presented by ProcessNet, a scientific platform of the Gesellschaft für Chemische Technik und Biotechnologie e.V at the annual conference in Karlsruhe.
Gmehling was appointed Professor of Technical Chemistry at the University of Oldenburg in 1989. Gmehling's work focuses on the measurement, collection and estimation of thermophysical material properties and the development of thermodynamic models with regard to the development, design and optimisation of chemical plants. He has built up the Dortmund database, the world's largest factual database for pure substance and mixture properties. He has also written several textbooks on thermal process engineering, thermodynamics and technical chemistry, a large number of data collections and founded two companies (DDBST GmbH, LTP GmbH).
Gmehling has received various international awards for his research: the Arnold Eucken Prize (1982), Rossini Lectureship Award (2008) and the Gmelin-Beilstein Medal (2010). Gmehling has been retired since 2011.