News - Finden

Finden featured in ESRF – The European Synchrotron Highlights

Finden Ltd has been selected to feature in the ESRF – The European Synchrotron 2022 Highlights. Former Finden employee Dr. Dorota Matras’s work can be found on page 148 (Full paper at https://lnkd.in/ek6aUS-t). Many thanks to the ESRF ID31 team, Marta Mirolo, Isaac Martens and Jakub Drnec, for their help with this experiment!
The research work was a collaboration with UCL Chemistry. Read more about our work at ESRF – The European Synchrotron during 2022 at https://esrf.fr/Apache_files/Highlights/2022/#/page/0.

STORMING project award

Image: STORMING EU project

We are proud to announce Finden Ltd have been awarded a grant to take part in research on structured unconventional reactors for CO2-free methane catalytic cracking as part of the STORMING EU project.

STORMING EU 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.

Finden are performing X-ray characterisation of the catalysts used for methane to nanostructures and hydrogen formation. This will involve spectroscopy and scattering on powders as well as X-ray imaging of structured reactors. Finden will be supporting a new PhD student Antonia Bobitan in research on this project.

More information about the STORMING EU project can be found at https://storming-project.eu

Prioritising the industry customer

Director Dr. Simon Jacques gave an interview for the CERN Courier in September oncollaboration between Europe’s large-scale research facilities and industry. Simon spoke about the our science-as-a-service business model and new plans to diversify beyond conventional X-ray analysis techniques and synchrotron science.

Find the article at https://cerncourier.com/a/prioritising-the-industry-customer/

FUSE summer internship

The FUSE summer internship was a 8 week placement for talented and enthusiastic undergraduate students to work with battery researchers from Faraday Institution industrial and university partners. It was an opportunity to further develop their skills and inspire them to continue a career in research in the battery sector!

We were very impressed with our intern Kenan (https://futurecat.ac.uk/faraday-undergraduate-summer-experience-fuse-2022-welcome/ and https://www.faraday.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/KenanGnonhoueDokononFUSE2022FutureCat_vf.pdf) and delighted that his poster was highly commended by the judging panel.

SNI 2022 conference

Image copyright: HZB / photographer M. Setzpfandt

Our Director Dr Simon Jacques gave a talk in the Industry, Innovation and Transfer microsymposium at the SNI 2022 conference in Berlin. The conference was attended by over 400 researchers from across Europe who met to discuss their work insynchrotron radiation, neutrons and ion beams.

More information about the event can be found at https://www.helmholtz-berlin.de/events/sni-2022/index_en.html

Big Science Business Forum

Our Director Dr Simon Jacques attended the Big Science Business Forum in Granada a business oriented conference which congregates the main European research infrastructures, focused on technology and with the aim to be the main meeting point between research infrastructures and industry. Simon presented at a training session related to analytical services, opportunities and experience.

More information about the event can be found at https://www.bsbf2020.org

Prof. Andrew Beale receives 2022 Materials Chemistry Division mid-career Award: Peter Day Award!

We are proud to announce our Chief Scientific Officer Prof. Andrew Beale has won a Royal Society of Chemistry award! He is the winner of the 2022 Materials Chemistry Division mid-career Award: Peter Day Award. Andrew was given the award for his work in the development of novel methodologies using bright light sources to identify active species in catalysis and energy storage.

“Still after all of these years it is exciting to be one of the first pairs of eyes to see something for the first time.” ~ Prof. Andrew Beale

Read about it at https://www.rsc.org/prizes-funding/prizes/2022-winners/professor-andrew-beale/

The 27th North American Catalysis Society Meeting NAM27

Our R&D Lead Scientist Dr Antony Vamvakeros spoke at the 27th North American Catalysis Society Meeting (NAM27) in New York. This biennial meeting is widely recognized as the premier topical catalysis conference for matters related to homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis, while also including broad coverage of electro-catalysis and photo-catalysis.

He presented our work on diffraction, tomography, catalysis, fuel cells, liion batteriesand neural networks.

Team Up for Transfer – KFS Transfer Workshop

Our Director Simon Jacques discussed how to increase the societal benefit of synchrotron radiation sources at the KFS Transfer Workshop with over forty attendees in Berlin.

Discussions at the workshop focussed on synchrotron achievements, challenges and ideas for future improvements with three sessions on, “Synchrotron Access for Industrial Research”, “Synchrotron/Industry hardware co-developments” and “Synchrotron/Industry methodological co-developments”.

The workshop brought together synchrotron radiation sources, academics and spin-offs as intermediaries to attract industrial research.

“It was great to hear that industry, large scale facilities and indeed academia recognise the pivotal role that intermediary companies like Finden have in the research landscape. This included addressing the fundamental issues of ever larger data driven by advances in instrumentation. Our involvement is a win, win, win for facilities, academia and industry. We are using spare measurement capacity, relieving the data processing and analysis burden from the facilities and adding value to industry to academia. This is leading to more efficient research, allowing accelerated innovation enabling academia and industry to more quickly address societal needs.” ~ Simon Jacques

Li-ion battery project collaboration with Teesmat

It was exciting to be involved in this TEESMAT scientific case study. We contributed to the design and acquisition of ex situ X-ray scattering/diffraction tomography measurements of industrially-relevant prolonged cycled Li-ion batteries at beamline ID31 of the ESRF. The data handling of the raw data (ca. 2.25 TB) and the analysis of the ca. 6,500,000 reconstructed SAXS/XRD patterns was significantly accelerated by our inhouse developed deep learning methods, such as the PQ-Net (you see here the open access paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41524-021-00542-4). We had the opportunity to collaborate with CRF, CEA, VITO and CERTH on this project, looking at degradation mechanisms in Li-ion batteries.

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