DIAD-Dual Imaging and Diffraction Beamline
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Diamond Proposal Number(s):
[41953]
Open Access
Abstract: The development of efficient recycling processes for lithium-ion battery electrode materials is essential for sustainable battery technologies. TiNb2O7 (TNO) is an attractive high-power anode material, but recycling strategies remain largely unexplored. Here, we report a direct recycling approach for TNO anodes recovered from a cycled TNO/LiNi0.6Mn0.2Co0.2O2 cell. We find that residual lithium in recovered TNO promotes the formation of a lithiated rutile impurity phase and Ti2Nb10O29 during thermal processing, which degrades the electrochemical performance of the recovered TNO. Structural and compositional analyses reveal the origin of these phases and guide the development of a recycling route that combines hydrothermal lithium removal with a subsequent heat treatment, preventing impurity formation. Recycled TNO produced by this method delivers high capacity, excellent rate capability, and stable performance at high current densities, achieving 279 (5) and 261 (10) mA h g−1 at 2 and 4 A g−1, respectively, comparable to commercial TNO. These results demonstrate a viable direct recycling strategy for TNO anodes.
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Sep 2026
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I11-High Resolution Powder Diffraction
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Diamond Proposal Number(s):
[36314]
Open Access
Abstract: Ocean-bearing icy worlds may harbour the necessary conditions for life, but we do not yet understand the processes that deliver ocean fluids to the surface where they are accessible to spacecraft. We demonstrate that hydrates of sodium-chloride (NaCl), a constituent of icy world oceans, record the thermal conditions experienced by NaCl rich fluids as they freeze. Through laboratory experiments, we identify four distinct NaCl-H2O assemblages, comprising crystalline and amorphous phases. The specific phase assemblage produced by freezing of brine depends on both the cooling rate and the initial brine salinity, with the production of metastable phases favoured at lower salinities and faster cooling rates. Different NaCl–H₂O assemblages exhibit characteristic near-infrared signatures that may provide a valuable tool for interpreting data collected by upcoming orbital missions to icy worlds. These results establish that the NaCl-H2O solid phase composition could be used as a new diagnostic probe of cryogenic processes on icy worlds, providing a means to reconstruct geological history of ocean-derived surface material and enabling space missions to assess the evolution of icy worlds across the outer Solar System.
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Sep 2026
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Open Access
Abstract: Icy worlds hosting subsurface oceans, such as Europa and Enceladus, are leading candidates in the search for habitable environments beyond Earth. Identifying cryovolcanic regions on the surface of icy worlds, where ocean-derived fluids are delivered to the surface, is critical for probing ocean chemistry and therefore assessing their potential habitability. Characterising these surface ocean deposits is a key objective of both European Space Agency’s JUICE and NASA’s Europa Clipper missions [1]. However, the mechanisms that transport ocean material to the surface, and the extent to which emplacement processes modify composition and structure of ocean material are poorly constrained.
NaCl is a major component that has been identified in the cryovolcanic plumes at Saturn’s moon Enceladus [2] and on the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa [3]. For more than 150 years, the NaCl-H2O phase diagram has only comprised of two known crystalline salt phases: NaCl (halite) and NaCl·2H2O (hydrohalite). Our recent work has discovered a novel metastable NaCl dihydrate formed through rapid freezing at rates comparable to cryovolcanic emplacement [4]. This metastable hydrate is stable below ~190 K, indicating that it can form and persist on the surfaces of icy worlds. This discovery provides the first evidence that ocean derived material on icy worlds may form previously unrecognised mineral phases under cryovolcanic conditions.
In this study, we assessed the compositional and structural signatures produced by variations in cooling rate and brine concentration. Raman spectroscopy, along with X-ray and neutron diffraction, was used to determine the mineralogical composition of NaCl-H2O ices formed over a range of cooling rates and concentrations. To investigate the effect of cooling rate on structure, we employed cryoSEM analysis. The aim of this study was to determine whether unique compositional and/or structural signature exist within NaCl-H2O assemblage as a function of cooling rate. Detection of these signatures would therefore provide insight into the thermal history experiences by the material.
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Jul 2026
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DIAD-Dual Imaging and Diffraction Beamline
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Open Access
Abstract: Continuous technological advancement and depleting natural sources of key metals such as gold necessitate highly selective recovery processes from secondary sources. Herein, we report the visualisation of a recyclable precipitation process using dual imaging and diffraction that gives insight into the mechanism of precipitation and highlights the possibility of kinetic separations.
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May 2026
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DIAD-Dual Imaging and Diffraction Beamline
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Diamond Proposal Number(s):
[39247]
Open Access
Abstract: This work presents the design and development of a 3D printed flow cell tailored for X-ray computed microtomography of liquid–solid systems. The flow cell is manufactured using stereolithographic printing and utilizes a novel pillarless pull-through geometry. The use of the flow cell developed for K-11 DIAD (Dual Imaging and Diffraction beamline, Diamond Light Source, UK) is demonstrated with the in situ flow and selective recovery of an Sn precipitate from solution using an organic ligand. The 3D designs and components are made freely available with this publication.
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Mar 2026
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DIAD-Dual Imaging and Diffraction Beamline
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Diamond Proposal Number(s):
[38775]
Open Access
Abstract: Understanding the interactions between microstructure, strain, phase and material behavior is crucial in scientific fields such as energy storage, carbon sequestration and biomedical engineering. However, quantifying these correlations is challenging, as it requires the use of multiple instruments and techniques, often separated by space and time. The Dual Imaging and Diffraction (DIAD) beamline at Diamond Light Source is designed to address this challenge. DIAD allows its users to visualize internal structures (in two and three dimensions), identify compositional/phase changes and measure strain. It enables in situ and operando experiments that require spatially correlated information. DIAD provides two independent beams combined at one sample position, allowing `quasi-simultaneous' X-ray computed tomography and X-ray powder diffraction. A unique functionality of the DIAD configuration is the ability to perform `image-guided diffraction', where the micrometre-sized diffraction beam is scanned over the complete area of the imaging field of view without moving the specimen. This moving-beam diffraction geometry enables the study of fast-evolving and motion-susceptible processes and samples. Here, we discuss the novel moving-beam diffraction geometry, presenting the latest findings on the reliability of both the geometry calibration and the data-reduction routines used. We provide a comprehensive quantitative assessment of the moving-beam diffraction geometry implemented at the DIAD beamline, which will serve as a reference for beamline users. Our measurements confirm that diffraction is most sensitive to the moving-beam geometry for the conventional transmission geometry of the detector. The observed data confirm that the motion of the Kirkpatrick–Baez mirror coupled with a fixed-aperture slit results in a rigid translation of the beam probe, without affecting the angle of the incident-beam path to the sample. Our measurements demonstrate that a nearest-neighbor calibration can achieve the same accuracy as a self-calibrated geometry when the distance between the calibrated and probed sample regions is smaller than or equal to the beam spot size. The absolute error of the moving-beam diffraction geometry at DIAD with typical calibration setup remains below 0.01%, which is the accuracy we observe for the beamline with stable beam operation.
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Dec 2025
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DIAD-Dual Imaging and Diffraction Beamline
I12-JEEP: Joint Engineering, Environmental and Processing
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Franck P.
Vidal
,
Shaghayegh
Afshari
,
Sharif
Ahmed
,
Alberto
Albiol
,
Francisco
Albiol
,
Éric
Béchet
,
Alberto Corbí
Bellot
,
Stefan
Bosse
,
Simon
Burkhard
,
Younes
Chahid
,
Cheng-Ying
Chou
,
Robert
Culver
,
Pascal
Desbarats
,
Lewis
Dixon
,
Johan
Friemann
,
Amin
Garbout
,
Marcos
García-Lorenzo
,
Jean-François
Giovannelli
,
Ross
Hanna
,
Clémentine
Hatton
,
Audrey
Henry
,
Graham
Kelly
,
Christophe
Leblanc
,
Alberto
Leonardi
,
Jean Michel
Létang
,
Harry
Lipscomb
,
Tristan
Manchester
,
Bas
Meere
,
Claire
Michelet
,
Simon
Middleburgh
,
Radu P.
Mihail
,
Iwan
Mitchell
,
Liam
Perera
,
Martí
Puig
,
Malek
Racy
,
Ali
Rouwane
,
Hervé
Seznec
,
Aaron
Sújar
,
Jenna
Tugwell-Allsup
,
Pierre-Frédéric
Villard
Diamond Proposal Number(s):
[29820]
Open Access
Abstract: gVirtualXray (gVXR) is an open-source framework that relies on the Beer–Lambert law to simulate X-ray images in real time on a graphics processor unit (GPU) using triangular meshes. A wide range of programming languages is supported (C/C++, Python, R, Ruby, Tcl, C#, Java, and GNU Octave). Simulations generated with gVXR have been benchmarked with clinically realistic phantoms (i.e. complex structures and materials) using Monte Carlo (MC) simulations, real radiographs and real digitally reconstructed radiographs (DRRs), and X-ray computed tomography (XCT). It has been used in a wide range of applications, including real-time medical simulators, proposing a new densitometric radiographic modality in clinical imaging, studying noise removal techniques in fluoroscopy, teaching particle physics and X-ray imaging to undergraduate students in engineering, and XCT to masters students, predicting image quality and artifacts in material science, etc. gVXR has also been used to produce a high number of realistic simulated images in optimisation problems and to train machine learning algorithms. This paper presents a comprehensive review of such applications of gVXR.
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Nov 2025
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DIAD-Dual Imaging and Diffraction Beamline
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James
Le Houx
,
Daniel
Mckay Fletcher
,
Alberto
Leonardi
,
Katherine A.
Williams
,
Nancy
Walker
,
Fernando
Alvarez-Borges
,
Ebrahim
Afsar Dizaj
,
Madhu
Murthy
,
Ronan
Smith
,
Liam
Perera
,
Navid
Aslani
,
Andrew
James
,
Sharif
Ahmed
,
Tiina
Roose
,
Siul
Ruiz
Diamond Proposal Number(s):
[30961, 32138, 33343]
Open Access
Abstract: Soil compaction and escalating global drought increase soil strength and stiffness. It remains unclear which plant root biomechanical mechanisms/traits enable growth in these harsh conditions. Here, we combine synchrotron X-ray computed tomography with spatially resolved X-ray diffraction to characterize the biomechanics of a replica root-soil system. We map the strain field around the root tip analog, finding strong agreement with finite element simulations, thereby demonstrating a promising new in vivo measurement protocol.
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Jul 2025
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I11-High Resolution Powder Diffraction
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Rachael
Hamp
,
Christoph
Salzmann
,
Peter
Fawdon
,
Zachary
Amato
,
Milz
Beaumont
,
Hannah
Chinnery
,
Paul
Henry
,
Thomas
Headen
,
Liam
Perera
,
Stephen
Thompson
,
Mark
Fox-Powell
Open Access
Abstract: Sodium chloride (NaCl), the most common salt on Earth, has been detected at several icy worlds that could be habitable in the present day, including Europa [1], Enceladus [2], Ganymede [3] and Ceres [4], providing evidence that salty liquid water from their interiors has been delivered to their surfaces. Areas that have experienced the emplacement of subsurface fluids through mechanisms such as plumes could contain a record of recently exposed ocean material and thus provide information on ocean chemistry and potential habitability. Identifying such regions will be a major priority for upcoming missions such as ESA’s JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) and NASA’s Europa Clipper.
Here, we report the discovery of a metastable NaCl dihydrate formed through rapid freezing of a NaCl solution at ambient pressure (Fig. 1) [5]. This new NaCl hydrate expands on the recently identified NaCl hydrates formed in high-pressure experiments [6], and together with these reveals a rich phase behaviour in the low temperature Na-Cl-H2O system that had been overlooked for over 200 years. Using synchrotron X-ray and neutron powder diffraction, we show that the metastable form transforms irreversibly to the stable hydrate hydrohalite above 190 K, exothermically releasing 3.47 kJ mol-1 of latent heat. Additionally, we used Raman and near-infrared (NIR) reflectance spectroscopy to show experimentally that the solid phase composition of NaCl-bearing ices varies as a function of fluid cooling rate, promising a means of reconstructing the formation history of NaCl-bearing icy world surface materials from remote measurements of their composition.
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Jul 2025
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DIAD-Dual Imaging and Diffraction Beamline
I13-2-Diamond Manchester Imaging
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Diamond Proposal Number(s):
[32980]
Open Access
Abstract: Machine learning techniques are being increasingly applied in medical and physical sciences across a variety of imaging modalities; however, an important issue when developing these tools is the availability of good quality training data. Here we present a unique, multimodal synchrotron dataset of a bespoke zinc-doped Zeolite 13X sample that can be used to develop advanced deep learning and data fusion pipelines. Multi-resolution micro X-ray computed tomography was performed on a zinc-doped Zeolite 13X fragment to characterise its pores and features before spatially resolved X-ray diffraction computed tomography was carried out to characterise the topographical distribution of sodium and zinc phases. Zinc absorption was controlled to create a simple, spatially isolated, two-phase material. Both raw and processed data are available as a series of Zenodo entries. Altogether we present a spatially resolved, three-dimensional, multimodal, multi-resolution dataset that can be used to develop machine learning techniques. Such techniques include the development of super-resolution, multimodal data fusion, and 3D reconstruction algorithms.
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Feb 2025
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