ALBA Synchrotron
InCAEM - In Situ Correlative Facility for Advanced Energy Materials
The project started officially in October 2022 and ends in December 2025. It includes new equipment, infrastructure and staff.
It's part of the Planes Complementarios programme, launched and funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation together with the Generalitat de Catalunya, with the support of NextGeneration EU funds. InCAEM belongs to the Advanced Materials project, aimed at developing new sustainable materials to be used in batteries, electric vehicles or solar cells, among others.
InCAEM has been developed in close collaboration by the ALBA Synchrotron, the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology – ICN2 (CSIC and BIST), the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona (ICMAB-CSIC) and the Scientific Information Port (IFAE-PIC).
InCAEM is a unique infrastructure open to all the scientific community for research in advanced energy materials in order to address the scientific challenges of the European Green Deal.
InCAEM Brochure
Promoting a sustainable economy
InCAEM is aligned with the European Green Deal, promoting the design of more efficient, clean and intelligent materials with direct benefits for society:
- Clean energy and sustainable technologies. The possibility of observing materials for energy and environmental applications at the atomic level while they operate under real working conditions allows the optimization of catalysts for green hydrogen, the development of longer-lasting batteries or the improvement of materials for solar panels. These advances contribute to accelerating the energy transition, reducing emissions and making key technologies cheaper in the face of climate change.
- Improving materials for everyday life. Correlative in situ studies allow a detailed understanding of how materials respond to heat, electricity or chemical reactions, which translates into more resistant screens, more precise sensors, more durable coatings or more efficient electronic devices.
- Health and environment. The combination of electron microscopy, surface techniques and multimodal analysis allows the development of more effective nanoparticles for medical diagnostic systems, membranes for water purification or advanced materials for capturing pollutants. Knowing their behavior at the nanoscale guarantees safe, effective and accessible solutions.
- Industrial innovation and competitiveness. The integration of advanced techniques with automated analysis flows accelerates the design and validation cycles of new materials, reduces costs and facilitates the leap from the laboratory to the market. This benefits sectors such as energy, electronics, mobility, chemistry or biotechnology, increasing the country's scientific and industrial competitiveness.
Benefits for the scientific community
Compatible operando sample environments for complementary characterization tools together with advanced data analysis will provide excellent opportunities for true multi-modal and multi-length scale characterization of functional materials.
While (S)TEM and scanning probe microscopies offer unsurpassed spatial resolution and a variety of contrast mechanisms, X-ray-based techniques provide highly specific chemical, structural, electronic and magnetic information with high efficiency so that larger fields of view, thicker samples and faster processes can be studied.
The possibility to perform experiments in situ, for example during relevant processes such as reactions, sample growth, thermal treatment or electrochemical cycles, and the correlation of results from different instruments with identical experimental conditions will permit linking the structural, compositional and morphological aspects of the same (nano)structures and of their surroundings for a comprehensive understanding of their structure-function relationship.
Beyond the instruments, InCAEM is also a digital infrastructure with robust computing systems for automated AI control of the instruments, automated AI-enhanced data analysis and modelling pipelines to accelerate discovery and innovation.
Partners
Pla de Recuperació, Transformació i Resiliència - Finançat per la Unió Europea – NextGenerationEU