Industry uses ESRF instrumentation
B A S F
THE FASTEST WAY TO ANALYSE
BATTERY SAMPL ES
KEY FACTS
STREAMLINE is a project that has
complemented the ESRFEBS upgrade by
enhancing user operation through new
procedures and systems
Funded by the European Commissions
Horizon 2020 programme it aims to
maximise the potential to users as swif tly
as possible of the extreme brilliance and
coherence of the new Xray beams This
is being achieved with new user operation
procedures new access modes
new training and new services including
automation
“ The automated solution that
the ESRF came up with was
better than I expected ! ”
Bernd Hinrichsen, research manager, BASF
T H E C O M P A N Y
BASF is the largest producer of chemicals in the world.
A European multinational, it has subsidiaries and joint
ventures in over 80 countries, a revenue in excess of
€80bn and more than 110,000 staf f. A third of these
employees are based at the company’s headquarters
in Ludwigshafen, Germany.
T H E W O R K
Batteries are a key technology in the transition to
climate neutrality and circular economies, but they
do not always deliver the power we need. In pursuit
of better lithium-ion batteries – the most common
type in consumer electronics and electric vehicles –
researchers at BASF’s Ludwigshafen site are keen
to optimise the synthesis parameters of lithium –
nickel–manganese–cobalt oxides, which constitute the
positively charged cathodes. This means analysing
one sample af ter another, which can be an incredibly
time-consuming task with lab instrumentation.
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T H E I M P A C T
“When one of our battery specialists asked me if we
could cope with 1000 samples a week, I knew it was not
something we could do with our lab instrumentation.
But I had been following the EBS upgrade at the ESRF,
and the higher X-ray brilliance. I thought, this could be
one killer application for all those photons coming out of
the tube. In fact, the automated solution that the ESRF
came up with was better than I expected. In just one
second, the beamline could record data of a single-to-
noise quality that would have taken us about a week.
We’ve since promoted the project into a venture within
BASFs business incubator
BERND HINRICHSEN RESEARCH MANAGER BASF
I M P A C T O N I N D U S T R Y