Grigoriy Yablonsky

Yablonsky was selected in 2013 for the James B. Eads Award, which recognizes a distinguished individual for outstanding achievement in engineering or technology.

Yablonsky is the author of seven books, most recently of "Kinetics of Chemical Reactions: Decoding Complexity" Wiley-VCH (2011) (together with Guy B. Marin), and more than 200 papers.

In 2008–2011, Yablonsky – together with Constales and Marin (Ghent University, Belgium) and Alexander Gorban (University of Leicester, UK) – obtained new results on coincidences and intersections in kinetic dependences, and found a new type of symmetry relations between the observable and initial kinetic data.

Since 2006, Yablonsky is an editor of the Russian-American almanac "Middle West".

From 1997 to 2007, Yablonsky was in the Department of Energy, Environmental and Chemical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis as a Research Associate Professor. Since 2007, Yablonsky became an associate professor at Saint Louis University's Parks College of Engineering, Aviation and Technology, as well as the Department of Chemistry.

Detailed mechanism of many real physico-chemical complex systems includes both reversible and irreversible reactions. Such mechanisms are typical in homogeneous combustion, heterogeneous catalytic oxidation and complex enzyme reactions. The classical thermodynamics of perfect systems is defined for reversible kinetics and has no limit for irreversible reactions. In contrary, the mass action law gives the possibility to write the chemical kinetic equations for any combination of reversible and irreversible reactions. Without additional restrictions this class of equations is extremely wide and can approximate any dynamical system with preservation of positivity of concentrations and the linear conservation laws. (This general approximation theorem has been proved in 1986.) The model of real systems should satisfy some restrictions. Under the standard microscopic reversibility requirement, these restrictions should be formulated as follows: A system with some irreversible reactions should be a limit of the systems with all reversible reactions and the detailed balance conditions. Such systems have been completely described in 2011. The extended principle of detailed balance is the characteristic property of all systems which obey the generalized mass action law and are the limits of the systems with detailed balance when some of the reaction rate constants tend to zero (the Gorban-Yablonsky theorem).

A simple scheme of the nonlinear kinetic oscillations in heterogeneous catalytic reactions has been proposed by Bykov, Yablonskii, and Kim in 1978. Authors have started from the catalytic trigger (1976), a simplest catalytic reaction without autocatalysis that allows multiplicity of steady states.