Ralf Steudel (* 25 March 1937 – 12 February 2021) was a German chemist and university professor who was known for his research in the area of sulfur chemistry as well as for his textbook Chemistry of the Non-Metals, which appeared in several languages and many editions. Complementing his pioneering contributions to polysulfides, he authored many reviews on the subject.
Steudel was born to a family of entrepreneurs in the Saxonian town of Kamenz. In 1954 he escaped to
West Berlin, and started his university studies in chemistry in 1957 at the
Free University Berlin under the supervision of Peter Wolfgang Schenk, whose research focused on
sulfur monoxide and related chalcogen compounds..Steudel graduated in 1963. In 1965, he received his PhD in chemistry at the
Technical University Berlin
The Technical University of Berlin (official name both in English and german: link=no, Technische Universität Berlin, also known as TU Berlin and Berlin Institute of Technology) is a public research university located in Berlin, Germany. It was ...
(TUB) where he subsequently made his habilitation work resulting in the venia legendi for inorganic chemistry in 1969.
In the same year he was appointed professor of inorganic chemistry at TUB, a position he held until his retirement in 2003. In 1973/74 he spent 1 year as a visiting professor at the Spectroscopy Laboratory of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Research
Steudel made many contributions to the chemistry of sulfur. His group prepared several new allotropes, often using
titanocene pentasulfide. Two examples are S
11 and S
13, which resulted from the titanocene reagent and S
6Cl
2 and S
8Cl
2, respectively.
He also discovered routes to the
lower sulfur oxides
The lower sulfur oxides are a group of inorganic compounds with the formula SmOn, where 2m > n. These species are often unstable and thus rarely encountered in everyday life. They are significant intermediates in the combustion of elemental su ...
. One example is S
8O.
Much of his work benefited from the use of
high performance liquid chromatography
High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), formerly referred to as high-pressure liquid chromatography, is a technique in analytical chemistry used to separate, identify, and quantify each component in a mixture. It relies on pumps to pa ...
(HPLC) to analyze reaction and to assess purity. Using HPLC, he established the existence of rings up to S
18 and beyond.
Publications (textbooks)
* (with D. Scheschkewitz): Chemistry of the Non-Metals, 2nd ed., Berlin; Boston, Mass.: de Gruyter, 2019, 760 pages, .
* (ed.): Anorganische Chemie: Prinzipien von Struktur und Reaktivität, Authors: James E. Huheey, Ellen A. Keiter, Richard L. Keiter, 5th Edition, Berlin; Boston, Mass.: de Gruyter, 2014, .
External links
Website on the Research Activities by R. Steudel and his group der
Technischen Universität Berlin, retrieved 15 August 2010.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Steudel, Ralf
1937 births
Living people
21st-century German chemists
Academic staff of the Technical University of Berlin
20th-century German chemists