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ESRF licenses micro-furnace for hot experiments

02-11-2016

The Business Development Office has just licensed a micro-furnace for experiments on beamlines at synchrotron sources to the French company IRELEC. This furnace will enable scientists to reach temperatures of 1300K. Licensing products owned by the ESRF is one of the activities of the Business Development Office.

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The Micro-Furnace is a compact and lightweight sample heater that can be used for tomography, X-ray scattering experiments (reflection, transmission) or diffraction in fluorescence mode. Samples can be heated from 298K up to 1100K in static gas configuration or up to 1300K under vacuum.

This furnace allows for complex experiments, such as those with gas flow and it is easily adaptable to any existing beamline design.

As Raphaël Richaud, business development manager of IRELEC, explains: “there is a longstanding collaboration between the ESRF and us. The ESRF is a source of an enormous amount of engineering expertise and designs and it has been very important for the development of our business”.

“Licensing is an important way to share our technologies, whilst generating an economic impact for the ESRF and for the licence holders”, says Ed Mitchell, head of the Business Development Office. “We are very happy to be able to contribute to the success of technological companies thanks to our know-how”.

Focused on precision and reliability, IRELEC provides research & development facilities with custom positioning systems and smart robotic cells.

 

 

Top image: Microfurnaces have allowed multidisciplinary research at the ESRF. In the picture, bread being studied as it bakes.