Shutdown BESSY II: work has started
As of 30 July 2018, BESSY II will be down for several weeks. In the summer shutdown, important components in the storage ring tunnel will be replaced and overhauled. The first conversion work for the BESSY VSR project also begins. Upgrading BESSY II into a variable-pulse-length storage ring (BESSY-VSR) will provide unique experimental conditions for researchers worldwide. The shutdown lasts until 30 September 2018, and user operation will recommence on 30 October 2018.
While the ring is down, the HZB employees will be completely modifying the multipole wavelength shifter, the EDDI beamline and the radiation protection hutches. This space will be needed for installing the cold supply for the superconducting cavities in the storage ring. These are key components in the creation of BESSY VSR. Keeping them cold, however, requires an elaborate infrastructure, which is to be built up in the experimental hall over the next two years.
There is even more that has to be done during this shutdown: colleagues from the Institute for Accelerator Physics are constructing a diagnostics beamline for BESSY VSR in the vicinity of the EMIL hutch. In addition, the two wavelength shifters will be revised and further components (Landau cavities and a CPMU17) will be installed for the EMIL laboratory. Plus, a laboratory for electrochemical experiments on solid-liquid boundary interfaces (BEIChem) is to be built at BESSY II.
You can take a detailed look at everything that will be going on during the shutdown in the HZB Science Blog
- Battery research: visualisation of aging processes operandoLithium button cells with electrodes made of nickel-manganese-cobalt oxides (NMC) are very powerful. Unfortunately, their capacity decreases over time. Now, for the first time, a team has used a non-destructive method to observe how the elemental composition of the individual layers in a button cell changes during charging cycles. The study, now published in the journal Small, involved teams from the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), the University of Münster, researchers from the SyncLab research group at HZB and the BLiX laboratory at the Technical University of Berlin. Measurements were carried out in the BLiX laboratory and at the BESSY II synchrotron radiation source.
- New instrument at BESSY II: The OÆSE endstation in EMILA new instrument is now available at BESSY II for investigating catalyst materials, battery electrodes and other energy devices under operating conditions: the Operando Absorption and Emission Spectroscopy on EMIL (OÆSE) endstation in the Energy Materials In-situ Laboratory Berlin (EMIL). A team led by Raul Garcia-Diez and Marcus Bär showcases the instrument’s capabilities via a proof-of-concept study on electrodeposited copper.
- Green hydrogen: A cage structured material transforms into a performant catalystClathrates are characterised by a complex cage structure that provides space for guest ions too. Now, for the first time, a team has investigated the suitability of clathrates as catalysts for electrolytic hydrogen production with impressive results: the clathrate sample was even more efficient and robust than currently used nickel-based catalysts. They also found a reason for this enhanced performance. Measurements at BESSY II showed that the clathrates undergo structural changes during the catalytic reaction: the three-dimensional cage structure decays into ultra-thin nanosheets that allow maximum contact with active catalytic centres. The study has been published in the journal ‘Angewandte Chemie’.