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Address: Building R71, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell, Oxford, OX11 0QX
Email: office@finden.co.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)7734 225187
Finden Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales. Company number: 8254352. & VAT number 155119814. Our registered office: Finden, The Oxford Science Park Robert Robinson Avenue, Magdalen Centre, Oxford, England OX4 4GA.
Operando XRD mapping experiment at ESRF for the FutureCat project
Image credit: Harry Gillions (WMG)
Our Senior Scientist Dr. Stephen Price, with Dr. Ashok Menon and Harry Gillions from collaborator institute WMG, University of Warwick completed a beamtime in May at ESRF. They set up an operando XRD mapping experiment on multilayer pouch cells fabricated at the WMG battery scale up pilot line to understand their degradation modes.
Stephen has been studying X-ray diffraction computed tomography (XRD-CT) and mapping techniques to provide direct quantification of performance of real world battery operation without the need to extrapolate from model cells. He is looking to devise non-destructive techniques to rapidly benchmark industry-relevant large-format cells, such as those manufactured at WMG, and further develop the operando methods that can be applied to study battery degradation that occur with long-term cycling. These findings can be translated back to WMG , and then to the broader industry to build better batteries.
Finden partnered with University of Sheffield and WMG as part of FutureCat Phase II activities, led by Prof Louis Piper at WMG to work on the Faraday Institution’s collaborative project along with eight other industrial partners, eight other academic partners and two national research facilities. They aim to create the future lithium-ion cathode materials for electric vehicles.
Latest work exploring the use of the ProxSkip algorithm
We are excited to share our latest work exploring the use of the ProxSkip algorithm as an efficient solution for accelerating iterative methods in imaging inverse problems. This project was led by our Senior Research Scientist Evangelos Papoutsellis, in collaboration with Kostas Papafitsoros (Queen Mary University) and Zeljko Kereta (University College London). By randomly skipping regularisation steps, ProxSkip significantly reduces computational time without compromising convergence. We also introduce a novel variant, PDHGSkip, which further enhances performance. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that these methods deliver faster computations while maintaining high-quality reconstructions.
We acknowledge funding from from the Analysis for Innovators (A4i) Denoising of chemical imaging and tomography data project, in collaboration with National Physical Laboratory which supported early development. As part of this effort, we also extended the stochastic optimisation framework in the Core Imaging Library (CIL) to incorporate these new algorithms. We are pleased to announce that this work has been accepted for presentation at the 10th International Conference on Scale Space and Variational Methods in Computer Vision (SSVM2025). For more information, we refer to the preprint version https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.
PhD student Antonia Bobitan completed 2nd beamtime of year for STORMING at DESY
Our PhD student Antonia Bobitan recently completed her 2nd beamtime of the year for STORMING. This time on beamline P21.2 at DESY, where she performed an in situ XRD-CT experiment on 3D-printed monoliths along with collaborators Dr. Matthew Potter (Bath), Maciej Walerowski (Southampton) and Dr. Lucy Costley-Wood (UCL). The team successfully tested our newly designed reactor and generated lots of nice images.
Successful beamtime for the STORMING project at the ESRF Beamline BM31 in Grenoble, France
Our PhD student Antonia Bobitan took part in a beamtime on beamline BM31 at ESRF in March with Prof. Andrew Beale and Dr. Yaroslav Odarchenko. They joined forces with Maria Asuncion Molina Esquinas from UCL. Antonia performed a combined XAFS/XRD operando experiment on our STORMING catalysts for CH4 conversion to high-purity H2 and CNTs. She is looking forward to spending the next few months analysing the large amount of data this successful experiment generated!
Spatial and Temporal Visualization of Polymorphic Transformations in Pharmaceutical Tablets
Our Senior Scientist Stephen Price has been working with Julia Gasol Cardona, Iain Oswald (University of Strathclyde), Daniel Markl (CMAC), Andy Maloney (CCDC – The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre), and teams at DESY, ELDICO Scientific AG and ESRF – The European Synchrotron on a project where X-ray Diffraction Computed Tomography (XRD-CT) has been used to reveal pressure-induced phase transformations in pharmaceutical tablets of glycolide as a function of compaction pressure. This novel application of the XRD-CT methodology enables non-destructive molecular level insight and is a step change in the way we are able to view formulated products. In the broader context of pharmaceutical research, the application of this methodology to pharmaceutically relevant systems will enable a deeper understanding of the effect of tableting pressure on the formulation in pharmaceutical products. Read the article at https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.202412976
4th STORMING Consortium Meeting in London
We were proud to host the 4th STORMING Consortium Meeting in London on the 11th & 12th September. It was wonderful to meet up with the consortium members and share new insights on the project.
STORMING will develop breakthrough and innovative structured reactors heated using renewable electricity, to convert fossil and renewable CH4 into CO2-free H2 and highly valuable carbon nanomaterials for battery applications. Find out more at https://storming-project.eu
Thank you to everyone for attending!
Obtaining parallax-free X-ray powder diffraction computed tomography data with a self-supervised neural network
Film about our RSC Chemistry Horizon Sir George Stokes Prize
The Royal Society of Chemistry made a short film to celebrate our Royal Society of Chemistry Horizon Sir George Stokes Prize with Sciad Communications and Cambridge FilmWorks. The piece was filmed at the Research Complex at Harwell, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and our joint recipients at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY in 2023. Here we speak about our work on the development and application of X-ray diffraction computed tomography to image and identify structure-activity relationships within functional materials and devices. Click on the image below to watch the film.
Read more about our work with chemical imaging and tomography.
Our Chemical Imaging and Tomography training course 2024 is complete
Our Chemical Imaging and Tomography training course in collaboration with The University of Manchester is complete and we’ve had a wonderful time with our participants.
Over the course of three days, our expert instructors guided learners through a comprehensive overview of this cutting-edge technology.
Students learned the fundamental principles, covering current instrumentation, and how these approaches are applied using the scattering and spectroscopic methods with emphasis on X-ray diffraction computed tomography (XRD-CT). In addition, our participants were introduced to XRD-CT data processing and analysis using Python, a powerful tool for interpreting chemical imaging data.
By the end of the course, they had new-found confidence to apply these skills to their own research.
Thank you to all of our amazing graduates. We were so impressed by the progress you made and we can’t wait to see the work you’ll accomplish with your newfound knowledge and skills!
Happy International Women’s Day
We would like to feature Antonia Bobitan our PhD student who has just completed experiments for her Storming EU Project at the DESY synchrotron.
“We’ve been doing some pretty cool stuff here at DESY beamlines P21.2 and P07, from magnetic induction heating to in situ XRD-CT of batteries.
For the Storming EU Project, we (FINDEN LTD, UCL) have successfully performed in situ/operando XRD experiments of CH4 conversion to H2, demonstrating the power of the Fe-based catalysts made by University of Bologna (Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna)!
I’m a person that’s environmentally conscious so I figured this degree would also create some opportunities for me to be involved in the fight against climate change. And it has, especially with the PhD project, which is all about creating carbon-negative H2 in order to reduce our fossil fuel usage.”
Congratulations and keep up the hard work Antonia!