Renewal of a Framework Agreement between SOLEIL and IFPEN

Since 2013, IFPEN teams together with our researchers have conducted 19 data collection campaigns at SOLEIL. Starting from a solid collaboration around catalysis and X-ray absorption, this partnership has proven to be exemplary.
It has been extended to include new methods and themes, bringing even more benefits to both parties. 

The measurements were adressing various topics, ranging from CO₂ storage to innovative materials synthesis or the study of industrial catalysts. This work resulted in 4 publications, 8 conference communications and 8 PhD. theses.

The fruitful exchanges between the research teams lead to real technical successes, including: 

• the characterization of agregation state of catalytic phases using small angle X-ray scattering.
• the developpment of specific tools (cells) to follow operando the reaction mechanisms in catalysts operated in industrial conditions (pressure of several tens of bars, temperature several hundreds of Celsius degrees)
• the exploration of the potential use of other beamlines of SOLEIL (infrared microscopy or Near Ambient Pressure X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (NAP-XPS)), in particular to follow the Fischer-Tropsch reaction used to produce second generation ultra-clean bio-fuels.   

After these key results stemming from this productive partnershps, SOLEIL and IFPEN decided to continue their collaboration with the renewal of their framewrok agreement for four years, with the ambitions and perspectives to: 

• get a multiscale represention of sytemes of interest for IFPEN (from atomic to micronic scale),
• follow the dynamics of mechanisms with synchrotron radiation (in-situ or operando characterization of materials).

Such a partnership enables SOLEIL to make even more progress in strategic areas central to the energy transition. And the access to synchrotron radiation is essential for IFPEN to conduct its research in the fields of catalysis, geoscience and biomass characterisation.

To celebrate this renewal, a special issue of the IFPEN newsletter Science@ifpen "Focus on SOLEIL for catalysis" is dedicated to the results obtained by the partners.