The Industry Impact Fund (I2F) is an Innovate UK initiative, designed to support UK industry by providing funding for them to access STFC facilities and scientific expertise.

Working with beamline scientist James Doutch and ReMade@ARI​ post-doc Yi Zhang, Graham and Tensei put together a successful I2F proposal. Ellie Purvis, from Tensei's R&D team explains: “We told the ISIS team the challenges that we had to solve. James and Yi were amazing and showed us how neutrons could be used to answer our problems."

Tensei were allocated four days of beamtime on Zoom, beginning with a 24-hour period to use to test whether the technique was appropriate and to learn how best to make the most of the remaining three days. “It was more hands on than I expected," adds Ellie, “it was great to learn how to do it rather than just observing. The flexibility of being able to get some analysis in real-time and adapt the experiment, using the labs to reprocess our materials to create new samples, was very helpful."

Whilst at ISIS for their experiment, Ellie was able to tour the rest of ISIS, finding out how other beamlines might be able to help Tensei solve other commercial challenges they might face in the future.

“After our beamtime, Yi sent over a comprehensive report explaining the results, and we also had a call for some clarification," explains Ellie. “I asked a lot of questions, and we were able to talk through the results together. I wanted to understand the results so that I could explain the benefits of the experiments to the rest of the company."

“Neutrons allow us to look at our materials on the molecular level and, in particular, their interaction with water. There is no way to do this with other techniques and without the I2F funding, we wouldn't have been able to access the facility at all."

"Our collaboration with ISIS has given us a unique insight into our materials that will be very beneficial in their further development. A combination of comprehensive training on the equipment and the support of an experienced and helpful team led to some great results from our initial visit," Ellie concludes.