SPring-8, the large synchrotron radiation facility

In 2010, the Frontier Soft-Material Beamline (FSBL) Consortium, which was established by strong cooperation between industries and universities using the facilities of SPring-8, developed a dedicated beamline, and carried out test operations. The Consortium confirmed that the FSBL has the world’s highest measurement performance. This achievement was published in the May issue of the scientific journal Polymer Journal published by Nature Publishing Group.

The paper attracted attention as it reports an achievement that will offer a new avenue for the development of new soft materials such as polymers and organic functional materials. The paper was featured on the cover of the journal as the highlight article of the May issue (Fig. 1). It is expected that the full-scale utilization of the FSBL will accelerate the development of new soft materials and strengthen the international competitiveness of Japan in this field.

Soft materials are mainly composed of polymers and organic materials. They have been used for familiar products such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles and are also indispensable materials in the fields of automobiles and aircrafts, as well as in cutting-edge fields, such as biomedicine, water treatment membranes, and organic solar cells. In addition, soft materials are essential in a society that aims to realize green sustainable chemistry^*1 because they are light, meaning that less energy is required for transportation and because bioresources can be used in their production as they are mainly composed of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.

The full-scale operation of the FSBL has just started. It has the following three features that are expected to strongly and effectively promote the development of next-generation soft materials.

1) FSBL has equipment at the first experimental hatch dedicated to the evaluation of thin-film material properties, such as the interfacial microstructures and the mechanism behind adhesion, which are considered to be the keys to developing new soft materials, for organic thin films and adhesive interfaces in solar cells.
2) The world’s largest-scale experimental space [3 m (W) × 3 m (D) × 4 m (H)] in a synchrotron radiation center was prepared in order to directly install the production lines of companies participating in the Consortium (second experimental hatch). This space is used to reproduce actual production processes in the experimental hatch and to analyze the structure of materials using synchrotron radiation.
3) In general, the time required for the application and review of an experimental proposal to use the SPring-8 facilities is from six months to one year; however, it has been shortened to approximately a few months through the cooperative development and management of the application system between industries and universities, realizing an environment that can rapidly respond to the demands of research and development (R&D) from companies.

Research groups of 19 leading companies in the fields of chemistry, textiles, and other fields and 20 academic institutions, mostly national universities, have installed large units such as molding equipment and new materials under development to start the full-scale utilization of the FSBL. The FSBL enables the structural analysis at a molecular level of soft materials that have not been clarified so far. This will promote not only research on clarifying the structures of materials that can realize new functions but also the development of new production processes through the examination of structural changes in materials during their production process.

Many industrial, government, and academic R&D institutions were affected by the Tohoku earthquake, which threatened Japan’s status as a world leader in science and technology. It is hoped that the FSBL will also contribute to post-earthquake reconstruction as Japan’s core center for soft material development and as an R&D tool that escaped damage from the Earthquake, through the development of new soft materials and new industries.

Publication:
"Multipurpose soft-material SAXS/WAXS/GISAXS beamline at SPring-8"
Hiroyasu Masunaga, Hiroki Ogawa, Takumi Takano, Sono Sasaki, Shunji Goto, Takashi Tanaka, Takamitsu Seike, Sunao Takahashi, Kunikazu Takeshita, Nobuteru Nariyama, Haruhiko Ohashi, Toru Ohata, Yukito Furukawa, Tomohiro Matsushita, Yasuhide Ishizawa, Naoto Yagi, Masaki Takata, Hideo Kitamura, Kazuo Sakurai, Kohji Tashiro, Atsushi Takahara, Yoshiyuki Amamiya, Kazuyuki Horie, Mikihito Takenaka, Toshiji Kanaya, Hiroshi Jinnai, Hiroshi Okuda, Isamu Akiba, Isao Takahashi, Katsuhiro Yamamoto, Masamichi Hikosaka, Shinichi Sakurai, Yuya Shinohara, Akihiko Okada and Yasunori Sugihara
Polymer Journal 43, 471–477 (2011), published online 30 March 2011