Accessing industrial beamtime at Diamond

Aerial view of Diamond Light Source, Oxfordshire

A joint venture between the UK government through the Science and Technology Facilities Council and the Wellcome Trust, Diamond Light Source is the UK national synchrotron science facility based at the Harwell Campus in South Oxfordshire. Diamond opened its doors for academic users in January 2007 with industrial users following a year later.

Diamond produces X-ray, infra-red and ultraviolet beams of exceptional brightness for research purposes. This brilliant light, combined with state of the art technological platforms, is extensively used by the scientific community to undertake structural, chemical and imaging investigations of a broad range of materials on very fast timescales and under industrially relevant conditions. Diamond’s capabilities are very well suited to a wide variety of materials research applications ranging from aircraft fan blades to catalysts, hydrogen storage materials and batteries to high performance coatings, and fuel additives and complex formulations for the pharmaceutical and consumer products industries respectively.

Broadly speaking, the materials characterisation facilities at Diamond fall into three main technique categories; diffraction for structural analysis of material from the atomic to macro scale; spectroscopy for chemical analysis of local atomic structure in materials and imaging, with a wide variety of imaging techniques including high resolution and high speed tomography and phase contrast imaging. A key benefit of synchrotron facilities like Diamond is the ability to perform in situ and in operando experiments, closely mimicking the conditions experienced by the sample during processing and monitoring changes in real time.

Crystallography in action at Diamond

The extremely bright light produced by Diamond for research and development purposes is used by the 25 operational state of the art instruments to perform a wide range of experiments. The time allocated to each group of researchers to investigate their projects using the instruments at Diamond is called beamtime. The amount of beamtime required for experiments varies between techniques and sample types and typically ranges from an hour to several days depending on the number of samples and experiment complexity.

There are two main routes to accessing beamtime at Diamond; the peer review access route and the proprietary route.

Peer review access - The synchrotron is free at the point of access through a competitive application process, provided that the results are in the public domain. Industrial scientists are welcome to apply for beamtime through this route.

Proprietary access - For confidential experiments, up to 10% of the available beamtime is set aside for proprietary access, the most popular choice for industrial partners. Experimental beamtime is scheduled regularly throughout the year and then available to industrial partners on a first-come first-served basis. There is a fee for beamtime used and services provided. The work is performed under contract which guarantees complete confidentiality to the customer.

The Diamond Industrial Liaison Team

In order to facilitate the use of Diamond by researchers working in industry, an Industrial Liaison team has been established, comprising highly qualified scientists experienced in a range of techniques areas, enabling the translation of diverse research problems into meaningful analytical solutions. With flexible access and support from the Industrial Liaison team, Diamond is accessible to all researchers from industry and large multinationals, SMEs and start-ups are counted among Diamond’s clients.

The Industrial Liaison Team offer a range of services including a full experimental design, beamtime data collection and analysis service, ideal for those with limited time or experience of the techniques, right through to beamtime only for experienced scientists who prefer to collect and analyse their own data.

This flexible approach means that the Industry team can prepare a tailored package for you depending on the needs of each of your projects and will charge only for the time and services you actually require. Government funding streams may also prove helpful; previous industrial partners have attracted TSB funding for their project with Diamond.

The industrial user programme at Diamond is continuously growing with 90 companies from 12 countries now making use of its facilities through a range of services and collaborations. More than 25% of the academic users also collaborate with industrial partners, highlighting the significant role of synchrotron facilities in applied materials research.

Find out more about the Diamond Industrial Liaison Team here.

Diamond’s Industrial Science Committee provides guidance on opportunities for a wide range of industries to be engaged in research at Diamond and identifies industrial research priorities that help to shape the operational strategy of Diamond. Companies which have been or are currently represented on the committee include GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Johnson Matthey, Infineum, Rolls-Royce, Evotec, Shell, Unilever and National Nuclear Laboratory.

Image: Converting methane to methanol

While proprietary access remains a popular route for clients as it guarantees priority beamtime access and full confidentiality, participation in collaborative projects is also a useful way to develop technologies.

Three such projects are:

• Diamond and Johnson Matthey were among 18 partners in a Europe-wide consortium, CARENA (CAtalytic REactors based on New mAterials), a large EU-funded collaborative project creating technologies that enable efficient conversion of light alkanes and CO2 into higher value chemicals. See image - converting methane to methanol.

• Diamond, UCL and Johnson Matthey have formed a collaboration to study how methane can be upgraded to higher value chemicals.

• Diamond, Ilika Technologies, the University of Cambridge, and Rolls Royce have received funding as part of an Innovate UK grant to develop new alloy compositions for gas turbine engines with better thermo efficiency than current alloys; increasing performance, reducing CO2 emissions and reducing noise levels at take-off.

As the applications of Diamond’s facilities span a wide variety of techniques and industry sectors, an extensive range of case studies are available including Johnson Matthey describing their work on platinum speciation in three way catalysts, HP describing how Diamond beamtime helped to design nanoscale pigment dispersions for display applications, Infineum highlighting their work on controlling crystallisation in fuels and biofuels and GlaxoSmithKline outlining how the high resolution powder diffraction capabilities at Diamond helped with a manufacturing issue. These diverse examples demonstrate the opportunities that using Diamond could bring to your research activities.

If you would like to learn more about working with Diamond or have an idea to discuss, we’d be delighted to hear from you. Please do contact us on 01235 778797 or at [email protected]