1 5 8 H I G H L I G H T S 2 0 2 3 I
This chapter shows the continued and growing interest and value to industry of the ESRF as an X-ray source, helping to drive forward new technologies and supporting the competitivity of enterprises. The articles highlight some of the exploitation of the X-ray beamlines and cryo-EM facilities, from antibodies used in therapeutics (page 160), using waste materials in cement to lower environmental impact (page 161), or understanding brittleness in sapphire materials used in high- performance products (page 162), to investigating CO2 hydrogenation to make propane (page 163), nanoscale strain mapping for better semiconductor devices (page 164) and X-ray nanodiffraction to assess the microstructure of a protective hard coating utilised in cutting insert applications (page 165). This is but a small taste of the wide and varied industrial and commercial applications of the ESRF s advanced X-ray beamlines, facilities and skills. Most of the work done by companies though paid-for access at the ESRF remains confidential.
Innovating with industry, for industry
Innovation is at the heart of providing effective answers to today s global challenges and driving scientific and industrial efforts to respond to them. Research infrastructures like the ESRF are increasingly essential in providing the detailed scientific data and insights which, when combined creatively with innovation, result in improvements in materials and products.
It is this creativity that the ESRF, in engaging with industry, technological organisations and academics, aims to nurture. The ESRF s STREAMLINE project has catalysed creativity, enabling rapid developments and the culmination over the past year of ground- breaking advanced and routine services, based on mature methodologies. This deployment of novel, high- throughput routine services paves the way to the statistical measurement of large datasets and represents a major advancement for the industrial research community. The novel services have been developed in the domains of: Powder diffraction, supporting the domain or phase identification and strain and stress determination; X-ray fluorescence for elemental analysis recognition; 3D imaging where increased automation in collection of tomographic data can be a game-changer for non- destructive inspections and failure analysis. STREAMLINE has been especially important for the new high-throughput X-ray diffraction (XRD) service, co- designed with the needs of chemical company BASF. This is now operational at ESRF beamline ID31 and is soliciting interest from a range of companies that see an opportunity to harvest X-ray data from hundreds or thousands of samples in libraries and to use the data in their innovation pipelines. The work has also given birth to a start-up company, Momentum Transfer, which provides an A-to-Z service from sample preparation, logistics, data reduction and scientific interpretation of data into industry-friendly and useable formats.
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