Alongside industrial and academic partners, Air Liquide is also working with start-ups to accelerate its innovation strategy. The goal: to develop the Group’s future technologies and enrich its portfolio of sustainable solutions.
Using unique technology, we have designed a robot that allows us to model the interior of a structure in 3D, based on ultrasonic tests, without affecting the integrity of the equipment. Our solution enables quality control of all types of metallic or composite structures (pipes, aircraft hulls, etc.). It is currently used on Air Liquide sites, but also by companies such as ArcelorMittal, EDF and ExxonMobil, which see several advantages in the technology: avoiding industrial risks and improving the safety of operators, particularly for maintenance operations at height. We can also provide predictive maintenance using algorithms that estimate the remaining life of equipment.
To start, there was the meeting between Ekoscan and Air Liquide’s R&D teams in 2015. Together, we developed a customized monitoring solution for the inspection of hydrogen purification units and a robot to deploy this technology in an automated manner at Air Liquide’s industrial sites. Then we decided to create the start-up Intact together. This allowed us to structure a collaboration that had already existed for several years. ALIAD participates in Intact’s governance and is helping us to grow faster, for example by taking a minority stake in the Canadian company, Arcanite(2), to make it an exclusive partner and an operational base for development in North America.
We regularly exchange with their materials engineering experts to better understand the equipment we control. We also learn a lot about equipment integrity from the engineers who design gas production units, especially those related to hydrogen. Commercially, the fact that we have been able to test our technologies in different contexts for Air Liquide enables us to propose very convincing business cases to our other customers.
Air Liquide Venture Capital (ALIAD) is the venture capital investor of the Air Liquide Group. Since its creation in 2013, it has made more than 35 investments in technology start-ups operating in three key sectors: energy transition, healthcare and digital.
Accelair provides start-ups with a tailor-made hosting service and personalized support from Air Liquide experts. In 2021, three new start-ups joined Accelair: Umiami, which uses a unique process to reproduce 100% vegetable meat; Sirius Space Services, which is developing a reusable launcher for nano, micro and mini-satellites; and Carboneo, which offers an innovative process for reducing CO2 emissions. Located at the heart of the Paris Innovation Campus, Accelair houses a total of eight start-ups.
To foster the innovation ecosystems in which the Group has played a major role for many years, Air Liquide relies on its five Innovation Campuses (Paris, Frankfurt, Delaware, Shanghai and Tokyo), where researchers, customers, academics and entrepreneurs come together to imagine together the solutions of tomorrow, and on its Campus Technologies (Grenoble), which manufactures innovative solutions for its customers. The Group currently has more than 400 academic, industrial and start-up partnerships.
