Development of an In-situ Environmental Fluid Cell for Synchrotron X-Ray Microscopy

Observing solid-liquid interfaces with high resolution is important for comprehension of physical, chemical, and biological interactions between material and fluid. A more detailed knowledge of these interactions can substantially improve our understanding of the processes that occur during operation of catalysts and degradation of materials inside battery, as well as the operation of biological systems. Currently, a few liquid stages at synchrotrons have been home-built and suffer from leaks, are extremely cumbersome to use and do not provide any additional capabilities such as electrical biasing and heating of the sample. Failures of these liquid cells make experiments extremely challenging to carry out and in some cases endanger surrounding equipment. Our approach in this project will be to develop a continuous flow environmental cell specifically for X-ray microscopes that will allow operation of the sample in liquid and gas at a wide range of pressures and with on-chip electrical and heating capabilities. In Phase I we developed and successfully tested a prototype of the environmental cell and integrated it in a synchrotron X-Ray microscope. In Phase II we will develop this system to a production ready package that includes an integrated 3-axis holder motion stage and electrical biasing and heating capabilities of the sample, providing a wide range of in-situ abilities. Dynamic in-situ experiments are finding increasing use as direct methods to explore the relationships among materials processing methods, microstructure, and functional properties. X-ray microscopy can provide information about changes in chemical structure of materials with high spatial resolution during dynamic in- situ experiments. Many processes such as degradation of materials, charging/discharging of batteries, operation of cells/bacteria can be studied with X-ray microscopy and are of a great importance to academic as well as industrial research. The proposed platform provides a tool to study such changes in the chemical structure of materials.