1st International Youth School on Chemical Thermodynamics

The event takes up 21 to 25 August.

The 2019 International Conference on Chemical Thermodynamics in Russia was held in St. Petersburg. Its participants and members of the organizing committee supported the presentation of the city of Kazan and Kazan Federal University as a venue for this conference in 2022. During the conference, colleagues from other scientific centers in Russia and abroad evaluated the high level of research conducted in the field of chemical thermodynamics at the Institute of Chemistry, saw the capabilities of the instrumentation and accepted the proposal to organize the conference.

The main and key direction of chemical thermodynamics realized at the Institute of Chemistry is solution thermodynamics. Scientists are engaged in the study of intermolecular interactions realized between molecules of different types, as well as the search for the relationship between the structure of a molecule and its properties. For achievements in this field, the staff of Kazan University was awarded the USSR State Prize in Science and Technology (1987) for the cycle of works “Development of theoretical foundations of the chemistry of non-aqueous solutions and their practical use”.

With the development of the instrumentation base new areas in chemical thermodynamics appear, in particular, studies of “gas-solid” interactions, studies in thermochemistry of phase transitions and thermophysical properties of substances.

In 2017, the Institute established the Laboratory of Ultrafast Calorimetry. With the help of this cutting-edge method, the melting point of cyclodextrin, a component of many medicines and cosmetics, was established for the first time. Methods were developed to determine thermodynamic parameters of supercooled liquids, extremely low vapor pressures and enthalpies of vaporization of low-volatile compounds. Together with colleagues from the universities of Rostock and Halle-Wittenberg, studies of crystal nucleation in polymers are being conducted. Understanding the mechanism of this process and controlling the crystallization rate of polymers will improve their performance properties, such as strength and transparency.

Chemists have been actively involved in the study of crystallization kinetics of pharmaceuticals. Using the methods of classical and ultrafast calorimetry, a technique was developed for obtaining amorphous forms of active pharmaceutical ingredients, as well as new crystalline forms of pharmaceutical substances. The results obtained to date make it possible to offer manufacturers optimal conditions for obtaining and storing pharmaceutical forms with increased solubility and bioavailability.

It is important to note that all advances and new knowledge were immediately incorporated into the chemical thermodynamics course given to students. Thanks to this, the lecture course was included in the Encyclopedia of Physical Chemistry.

At the youth school, Timur Mukhametzyanov, Associate Professor of the Department of Physical Chemistry, will make a report on applications of ultrafast calorimetry for the study of substances and materials.

“In many modern industrial technologies, materials are cooled and heated at high rates that cannot be reproduced on conventional laboratory equipment. Ultrafast calorimetry has made it possible to study in detail the behavior of materials in such processes. In particular, with the help of this method it was possible to show that the mechanism of polymer crystallization changes when the polymer melt is cooled at high speed. Another problem that can be solved by ultrafast calorimetry is the measurement of the properties of thermally unstable and metastable substances. For example, many biomolecules and drug substances decompose upon heating. This leads to the fact that for them it is impossible to measure the temperature and thermal effect of melting by conventional methods. The ultrafast calorimetry method can overtake the decomposition processes of a substance and obtain these properties,” he explains.

Mikhail Yagofarov, Senior Research Associate of the Research Laboratory of Physicochemical Basis for Creation of Thin Films Based on Organic Materials, will present a paper devoted to a new ideology in the study of temperature dependences of thermodynamic functions of phase transitions of organic nonelectrolytes. It proposes new approaches that optimize the cost of determining the thermal effects of phase transitions and vapor pressures of organic compounds at different temperatures. This area has been rapidly developing at KFU since 2014 – over 40 papers have been published in renowned journals since then.