Thomas M. Klapötke
German chemist (born 1961)
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Thomas Matthias Klapötke (born 24 February 1961) is a German inorganic chemist at LMU Munich, studying explosives.
Klapötke was born in Göttingen; he grew up in Berlin and studied at Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin), completing his undergraduate degree in 1982, his PhD in 1986, and his habilitation in 1990. Klapötke worked as a lecturer at TU Berlin until 1995, when the University of Glasgow hired him for the Ramsay professorship. Since 1997, Klapötke has worked at LMU Munich as a professor of Inorganic Chemistry.[1]
Klapötke's lab at LMU Munich is a group of about 30 employees, mainly studying explosives. Klapötke's goal is to generate "green" explosives, that either burn to completion or leave few toxic residues.[2][3] Die Zeit called it "the only university laboratory in Germany investigating implements of war".[2] For this reason, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution watches Klapötke's lab quite closely.[3] Klapötke is funded both by the German federal government and the US military[4] and has won a number of awards, including the 1986 Schering Prize.[1] He is also one of the inventors of, and the namesake of the high-performing environmentally friendly high explosive TKX-50, which has higher performances than conventional explosives like RDX and HMX.
But remember, N-amino azidotetrazole is the starting material for the work. ...It's a base camp, familiar territory, merely a jumping-off point in the quest for still more energetic compounds. The most alarming of them has two carbons, fourteen nitrogens, and no hydrogens at all, a formula that even Klapötke himself, who clearly has refined sensibilities when it comes to hellishly unstable chemicals, calls exciting. ... The compound [link added] exploded in solution, it exploded on any attempts to touch or move the solid, and (most interestingly) it exploded when they were trying to get an infrared spectrum of it. — Derek Lowe, Things I Won't Work With: Azidoazide Azides, More Or Less, 9 January 2013
