Industrial Liaison update

Diamond is now working with 90 companies from 13 countries making use of 22 state-of-the-art beamlines, support facilities and expert staff. This achievement clearly demonstrates both the pivotal role that industrial engagement plays at Diamond and the value that companies place on the services that Diamond offers. Growing usage of Diamond by industrial clients has, in turn, led to expansion of the Industrial Liaison team this year. We are delighted to welcome Sally Irvine and Zoë Cattell who joined the team in late 2015 as Industrial Liaison Scientist for Imaging, and Marketing Manager, respectively. Sally will be assisting our clients with X-ray imaging projects and Zoë will be supporting the team through marketing activities, social media and events. In early 2016, we welcomed post-doctoral researcher Sin-Yuen Chang who will be working on soft X-ray spectroscopy applications.

The Industrial Liaison team: (L-R) Elizabeth Shotton, Claire Pizzey, Jitka Waterman, Alexandre Dias, Sally Irvine, Zoë Cattell, Anna Kroner, and Leigh Connor.

As the vast majority of our projects are confidential in nature, we welcome the opportunity to hear current and potential clients discuss the work that they have carried out using Diamond and the benefits that the work has brought to their business. Creating case studies is a useful way to demonstrate the applications of synchrotron techniques to a wide variety of applied research problems and we have recently published examples of in crystallo fragment screening (with Evotec), small angle X-ray scattering characterisation of biopharmaceuticals (with Porton Biopharma) and the use of X-ray absorption spectroscopy combined with X-ray magnetic circular dichroism to investigate the role played by iron in Alzheimer’s Disease (with Keele University).

The Illuminating Challenges in Automotive Research (iCAR) 2015 Conference in November was jointly hosted by the Diamond Industrial Liaison team and Infineum UK Ltd, one of the world leaders in the formulation, manufacture and marketing of petroleum additives for fuels and lubricants. iCAR2015 brought together scientific researchers and leading professionals from the automotive, oil and petrochemical industries to discuss the future of world transport and how cuttingedge science can be harnessed to help deliver the huge with their bespoke rig to study biaxial deformation in steel samples. increase in energy demand required to serve the global population, set to rise to 9 billion people by 2050.

iCAR 2015 took place at Diamond and was attended by over 100 delegates including representation from Shell, BP Castrol, Ilika, Johnson Matthey, Ricardo and the Warwick Manufacturing Group. Speaking at the meeting, Chris Locke, Executive Vice President Marketing and Technology at Infineum, commented:

“As a sector, the automotive industry has a complex set of challenges to overcome to bring about a successful, more sustainable future. Cutting-edge scientific research has a vital role to play, but it is also critical that we discuss these challenges across traditional boundaries so that the solutions that we come up with are workable in the context of society’s mobility needs as a whole. iCAR2015 has been fantastic in terms of helping people to consider different perspectives and come up with new ideas. We hope it will also spark future collaborations and developments as we plan energy and mobility developments out to 2050 and beyond.”

Speakers presented on a broad range of industry challenges and automotive research areas, describing how the sector might find answers to questions such as: which energy innovations in the automotive sector stand the best chance of commercial success? How can science facilities like Diamond help to deliver advanced fuels, oils, and lubricants? What improvements can be made to hardware design, fabrication, and processing? Can novel alloys be designed to improve the efficiency and durability of future vehicles? How can we further improve emission control catalysts? How can we make more efficient and longer lasting hybrid batteries?

During the iCAR meeting, David Collins, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford was presented with the 2015 Infineum-Diamond prize for Innovative Automotive Research using Synchrotron Light.

R-L: Infineum-Diamond prize winner Dr David Collins, Prof Hamidreza Abdulvand, Prof Angus Wilkinson, and Prof Richard Todd on the I12 beamline.

David has been working with BMW-MINI to experimentally investigate non-proportional strain-path effects in polycrystalline sheet steel. To better understand the material behaviour during a hypothetical manufacturing process, David designed and built a bespoke biaxial testing mechanism that can subject material to arbitrary strain-paths. He carried out his experiment in the external hutch of I12, Diamond's Joint Engineering, Environmental, and Processing (JEEP) beamline using his self-designed mechanism to acquire diffraction data whilst deforming samples, in situ, along different strain-paths. The results of David's experiment have been published in Acta Materialia (vol. 90, pp. 46-52, 2015).

We are very pleased to present David with this award and wish him every success in his future research.