In Memoriam: Alexander Burcat (1938 – 2025)

We have learned with heavy hearts that our dear colleague, cherished collaborator, thermodynamicist and kineticist, Alexander Burcat, passed away on August 19^th, 2025 in Haifa, Israel. Although he authored or coauthored about one hundred scientific and engineering papers and reports, Alex was best known as the author of the widely used database of thermodynamic properties in polynomial form, focused on chemical species relevant in combustion, propulsion, explosion, atmospheric chemistry, but used also in other areas, such as upper atmosphere kinetics, astrochemistry, abrasion metallurgy, etc.

Alexander Burcat was born on October 6th, 1938, in Bucharest, Romania. His Alma Mater was Hebrew University, where he obtained his B. Sc. in 1963, M. Sc. in 1965, and Ph. D. in 1969. He spent his postdoctoral years as a Visiting Scientist at Aerospace Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio (1969-1971) and at Wright State University in Dayton, OH (1971), after which he took a teaching and research position in 1972 at Technion, Haifa, receiving tenure in 1975 and becoming an Associate Professor in 1988. During his career, he was also a Visiting Professor at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, 1977-1978 and again in 2001, a Visiting Scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, CA in 1978, a Visiting Research Associate at NASA Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, OH, 1983-1984 and again in 1989, and a Visiting Scholar in the Chemistry Division at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, IL, 2004-2005. He was also a member of the IUPAC Task Group on Thermodynamic Properties of Selected Free Radicals and Critical Intermediates from Theory and Experiment, 2000-2006, and later became an IUPAC Fellow. Burcat formally retired from teaching and experimental research duties at Technion in 2007, but continued curating and expanding his database nearly full-time till mid-2023.

His thermodynamic database is extremely well known worldwide, appreciated, and widely used by both modelers and kineticists, as well as by a large number of other scientists, educators, engineers, and students at all levels. It is arguably the largest database of NASA polynomials in existence and has received nearly 2000 citations in the literature. The starting point was a relatively small combustion-related database of NASA polynomials assembled in 1972 by Burcat, containing 215 species. The Burcat thermodynamics data collection was distributed with the CHEMKIN-II program package, which was the first widely used combustion simulation code. He subsequently continued to expand and curate his database for half a century, eventually reaching the impressive size of more than 3400 chemical species. At first, the database contained only 7-coefficient polynomials (‘old’ NASA polynomials, compatible with the CHEMKIN mechanism format), but during his sabbatical at Argonne a second file, containing 9-coefficient ‘new’ NASA polynomials was added to the database. The database first appeared in print in 1984 as Appendix C of Gardiner’s Combustion Chemistry book. Subsequently, six progressively larger printed editions appeared as Technion Reports, with the last one being a joint Argonne and Technion report (DOI: 10.2172/925269) that marked the beginning of a series of periodic updates of Burcat’s database with accurate enthalpies of formation from the Active Thermochemical Tables.

In addition to the printed versions, in 1991 Burcat started sharing and disseminating his database in electronic form: at first via the Technion FTP server, and since late 2000s via his WWW website at Technion. In the early 2000s, Burcat’s FTP server at Technion was not easily accessible from abroad, so he arranged for his database to be mirrored every night by ELTE in Budapest. Most recently, the Burcat database became part of ELTE’s ReSpecTh collection, which now incorporates a copy of the latest version of his database, with additions for species searching and function plotting. The corresponding page is now dedicated to the memory of Professor Alexander Burcat.
Alex, you are being sorely missed. Thank you for your invaluable service to the scientific community, and may you rest in peace.

Branko Ruscic and Tamás Turányi