Research and Development [ Return towards  Company  ]

Research and development is critical to innovation. At Air Liquide, R&D is carried out at 7 research centers - in France, Germany, United States and Japan - and by "satellite teams" working directly at our customers' sites. This is offering a true pool of talents for the Group : over 850 researchers of 25 different nationalities.

Working closely and continuously with the most prestigious university research laboratories, and in direct contact with leading industrial partners, our R&D teams are improving our existing gas production technologies, developing new applications and services and using their technical expertise to enhance our group's performance.

By organizing our R&D efforts into major projects we can not only maintain a long-term commitment to specific fields of research, but also respond more rapidly to new safety and process reliability requirements and offer new products and services to the market.

A new patent application is filed each working day.

This Internet site should give you a better idea of our various activities and, we hope, convey the driving passion of our researchers to innovate for our lives.

Key figures :

• 850 researchers representing more than 25 nationalities
• 7 main research centers
• 2 680 protected inventions
• Budget : more than 200 million euros for innovation, research and technologies (2006)
• Over 100 industrial partnerships
• Over 100 international relationships with universities and research institutes