Robert Durrer

Robert Durrer (1890–1978) was a Swiss engineer who invented the basic oxygen steelmaking process (the Linz-Donawitz process, named after the towns where the technology was commercialized). The process was successfully tested by Durrer in 1948. A team led by Dr Theodor Eduard Suess in Austria adapted the process and scaled it to industrial size, after which it was commercialized by VÖEST and ÖAMG.

Career Durrer graduated from the Royal Technical University of Aachen in 1915. He stayed in Germany and in 1928 accepted the chair of the Professor of Metallurgy at the Technische Universität Berlin. In 1943 Durrer returned to Switzerland and was appointed to the board of von Roll AG, the country's largest steelmaker. Their commercial converter furnaces were put into operation in November 1952 (VÖEST in Linz) and May 1953 (ÖAMG, Donawitz) and temporarily became the leading edge of the world's steelmaking, causing a surge in steel-related research. Unlike Europe, whose industrial capacity had been decimated by World War II, America had a large base of steelmaking capacity, and it was economic to retain, rather than replace, its capital stock. U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel nonetheless introduced oxygen steelmaking in 1964; Japan became an early adopter and by 1970 produced 80% of its steel in Linz-Donawitz furnaces.

Durrer was a professor at ETH Zurich from 1943 to 1961. He edited and co-authored the multi-volume (Metallurgy of Iron, or the "Gmelin-Durrer").

Selected patents

Honors and awards Durrer's contribution to practical steelmaking was marked by the AIME Benjamin F. Fairless Award in 1966. etc.

He was awarded the Bessemer Gold Medal by the British Iron and Steel Institute in 1957 and the Rinman Medal by the Swedish iron and steel industry in 1959.

The annual Staudinger-Durrer Prize awarded by ETH Zurich commemorates Durrer along with Nobel Prize winner Hermann Staudinger.