SBIR-STTR Award

The project responds to technical topic 9(a): Technology to support BES user facilities: Synchrotron Radiation Facilities. Dr. Michael Feser, the principal investigator from Xradia, and Dr. Piero Pianetta, from SLAC, will work together to develop optimized hardware and controls tested on the SLAC Xradia nanoXCT- S100 microscope and sold for future and existing TXM systems by Xradia Inc. Stanford Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC) developed an x-ray microscopy facility, based on an Xradia Inc. Transmission X-ray Microscope (TXM), used by a growing community for research in the areas of energy (battery, fuel cell and catalysis R & amp;D), biomedical (bone and dental) and environmental remediation. Great strides have been made in energy research by extending the capabilities of the Xradia TXM to include energy scanning allowing in-situ 3-D imaging of the chemical states of battery and fuel cell electrodes and to watch catalytic reactions in real time. This was made possible by a SLAC developed open source software tool (TXM Wizard) that allows text scripts to be manually inputted into the TXM for special data acquisition modes (2D mosaic acquisition, 3D mosaic tomography, XANES spectroscopic tomography) and then be used for data analysis. In this project, Xradia Inc. and SLAC are partnering to develop these new spectroscopic capabilities into a commercial grade solution through: 1) development of an integrated, fully automated command and data interface between the TXM-Wizard and the Xradia control software. This will significantly increase the productivity of the TXM and allow non-experts, including industry users, to routinely access the advanced imaging modes; 2) optimize the TXM control system for the data rates made possible by advanced synchrotron sources to enable quick imaging for improved in-situ, real time studies of energy materials; and 3) incorporate a fully integrated scanning fluorescence mode into the TXM with an analysis area below 1 micrometer an ppm sensitivity. This will allow correlations between the structural/ chemical information obtained on majority elements within a sample in the transmission imaging mode of the TXM and trace elements which can only be observed using x-ray fluorescence. The new capabilities will greatly enhance not only SLACs ability to answer national energy needs and deliver on the DOE mission but also that of the other DOE hard x-ray user facilities developing x-ray microscopy facilities. The developed technology will be commercialized by Xradia Inc. through bundling with new TXM systems and upgrades to existing TXM systems.

Many important technology challenges today such as the capacity and life time of batteries require new characterization techniques to understand and improve performance. In the STTR Phase II project, novel x-ray microscope techniques and software are developed to be able to image samples in three dimensions and determine chemical composition and function on a microscopic level. As known from ubiquitous medical applications, x-rays are able to penetrate and generate images of objects that are opaque to our vision. They can visualize the inside of objects in three dimensions without disturbing or destroying the objectcritical for medical applications. The same advantages hold true at the microscopic scale, well beyond our ability to see things with the naked eye or even a high-powered optical microscope. X-ray microscopes are able to produce images of, for example, microscopic areas inside a battery to directly visualize the chemical processes going on during charging and discharging. Up to now, these were only grey-scale images showing structuremuch like black-and-white TV in the early days. High-powered x-ray sources and new technology developed at National Laboratories now has demonstrated that it is possible to not only show structure, but also put a color that corresponds to the chemical composition or even the chemical state of elements in these 3-D images. In Phase I of the project, it has been demonstrated that it is feasible to develop a robust, commercial solution to bring this color x-ray microscopy to a commercial solution. In Phase II of the project, the demonstrated capabilities will be packaged into a commercial solution that will be available to researchers at Universities, National Laboratories and Industrial Institutions. A new spectroscopic imaging mode with unprecedented sensitivity will be integrated into this solution to offer the capability to for example detect trace contaminants in soil samples and identify how they associate spatially with soil constituents. Commercial Applications and Other

Benefits:
The developed product is expected to have high impact in many current focus-areas of research. In particular, in the development and optimization of energy storage and conversion devices (batteries, fuel cells, etc.), water purification (membranes), and catalytic reactions to name only a few. The unique insight x-ray microscopes deliver in terms of understanding the structure, hierarchical organization and elemental/chemical interactions enables the design of targeted experimentation with an understanding of the detailed nano-scale mechanisms.