As new energy materials and intelligent equipment evolve rapidly, experimental validation is both the touchstone of technical breakthroughs and the ballast for bringing products to market. INFOR General Manager Ms. Yang Xiaoyan recently led the company's core technical team to the Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory, where the two sides discussed experimental methods, testing standards and joint research and reached several points of agreement, a solid step in building INFOR's collaborative innovation system linking industry, academia, research and users.
Visiting a leading research platform
Located in the core innovation corridor of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory is one of Guangdong's first provincial laboratories. Backed by leading institutions such as the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, it focuses on original innovation and commercialization in new materials, has advanced preparation platforms and leads many major national projects. Its full-chain model from frontier fundamentals to applied research and industrial transfer is regarded as a benchmark for materials science in China.
The INFOR team was warmly received and toured the exhibition hall and laboratory workshops. Laboratory experts introduced the lab's development and research areas and shared the latest experimental data and results, and technical staff from both sides discussed specific testing cases in detail.
Building consensus and starting joint work
As a high-tech company in new energy intelligent equipment, INFOR puts experimentation first. It has built a high-specification materials testing centre with laser particle size analysers, moisture analysers and scanning electron microscopes, together with precision drying equipment, sintering furnaces and automatic iron removers for process trials. The centre covers testing from powder characterization and slurry dispersion to electrochemical performance, providing customers with integrated material-process-equipment testing solutions. Using its own test data, INFOR has helped dozens of lithium, sodium-ion and solid-state battery companies optimize formulations and improve consistency and yield.
In the following discussion, the two sides exchanged technical routes and experimental design ideas on common challenges in new energy materials R&D. Ms. Yang said: "Experimental validation is the only bridge between theoretical hypothesis and engineering application. Companies cannot overcome deep material bottlenecks alone; we need a closed loop with top research platforms, demand-driven, jointly tackled, with immediate feedback." The laboratory praised INFOR's strengths in equipment engineering, process scale-up and market responsiveness and saw strong complementarity between the two.
After in-depth discussion, the two sides agreed to carry out joint work on several specific experimental projects through joint research groups, exchange of technical staff and regular seminars on experimental methods.
Experimentation powering the future
The visit reinforced the INFOR team's conviction that as the new energy industry moves from scale expansion to winning on quality, the depth of experimental capability determines how competitive products can be. INFOR will keep investing in its own testing centre, its accreditation and its people, while building regular cooperation with national platforms such as the Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory to link frontier characterization with industry pain points and provide customers with more reliable, efficient validation.