Henri Bernard Beer


Henri Bernard Beer was a Dutch inventor and business man. He is known in electrochemistry as the inventor of the mixed metal oxides coatings onto titanium, and the creator of two patents known as Beer I and Beer II. He was awarded the Vittorio de Nora-Diamond Shamrock award in 1980, and an honorary doctorate degree by the Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands in 1986.

Titanium-based electrodes

Henri Beer was working from 1957 to 1972 at the company Magneto Chemie, where he investigated the possibilities of coating titanium with a precious metal or precious metal oxide; he found this could be used to replace graphite in a chlor-alkali cell. He first experimented with rhodium electroplated onto titanium, and filed a patent on this. Almost simultaneously, but independently, J.B. Cotton's group in the Metals Division of ICI filed a patent on platinum electrodeposited onto titanium. The small-sized Magneto Chemie started collaborating with the much larger ICI on the development of titanium-based electrodes. Beer working at Magneto focussed on coating formulations, whereas others were working on the commercial viability of coatings onto titanium electrodes.
The platinum electroplated titanium electrodes had a large overpotential for chlorine evolution. The next step was moving from platinum electroplated titanium to platinum-iridium mixtures applied using the paint-thermal decomposition method. This eventually resulted in a platinum-iridium Pt/Ir 70/30 composition, with a much lower overpotential for chlorine evolution.

Patents

In 1965, Beer proposed another change in coating: application of ruthenium oxide onto titanium, and filed his first patent on mixed metal oxide coatings, known as Beer 1. That patent described the co-deposition of titanium and ruthenium oxides. Beer sold his technological concepts to the Italian company De Nora. In 1967, the Beer 2 patent followed, which covered the optimal, stabilized ruthenium-titanium oxide mixture for chlorine evolution in the chlor-alkali process. Since then, the titanium based electrode have been widely used in the chlorine, chlorate and hypochlorite industries.