Licensing products owned by the ESRF is one of the activities of the Business Development Office. In 2016, the BDO licensed two sets of equipment, both of them to IRELEC, a French company.

The first one was a micro-furnace for experiments on beamlines at synchrotron sources. This furnace enables scientists to conduct in situ experiments at up to temperatures of 1300 K. Being compact and lightweight, it is easy to install on many beamlines for experiments such as tomography, X-ray scattering (reflection, transmission) or diffraction in fluorescence mode. Already widely used at the ESRF, the furnace allows complex setups, such as those with gas flow, and it is easily adaptable to any existing beamline design.

The other licensed equipment is an 8-axis attenuator system. Raphaël Richaud, business development manager of IRELEC, explains the interest for this device: “It is a good way for IRELEC to enrich its offer for synchrotrons and we liked its design: compact and easy adaptable to any existing beamline and UHV compliant. It has already proven efficient and reliable, so we were confident in its technical quality”.

On the longstanding collaboration between the ESRF and IRELEC, he added that “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”.

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