Magnetic resonance imaging was used to study swelling dynamics and hydrogel formation of xanthan tablets with or without Pentoxifylline drug in water and HCl pH 1.2 media at two different ionic strengths. Significant changes were observed only in the erosion front positions leading to different hydrogel thicknesses. The impact of the drug on the hydrogel thickness was found to be dependent on the medium conditions at high enough drug amount. The drug does not change the hydrogel thickness in water medium, whereas in acid medium the presence of the drug results in thinner hydrogel. The increased ionic strength in water medium also leads to formation of the thinner hydrogel layer in tablets with high enough drug content, while the effect of NaCl in HCl pH 1.2 medium is very small.

The results of one- and two-dimensional 1H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) pulsed field gradient (PFG) diffusometry studies of water in white cement paste with a water-tocement ratio 0.4 and aged from 1 day to 1 year are reported. The study shows that the NMRPFG method is primarily sensitive to the capillary porosity. Data is fit on the basis of a lognormal pore size distribution with pore size dependent relaxation times. The volume mean capillary pore size is 4.2 μm in mature paste, similar to 1 week suggesting that hydrates and gel porosity do not form in the capillary porosity once the latter has been substantially created. No evidence is found of capillary pore anisotropy in cement paste.

It would be very beneficial to perform MRI of fluids and sense the fluid pressure changes. Our aim is to demonstrate a contrast agent capable of MR sensitivity to sub-atmospheric pressure changes. To achieve this, monodisperse microbubbles were prepared with an optically measured mean radius of 1.4 ± 0.8 μm. A repeated pressure change cycle was applied on the microbubble contrast agent, until it produced an MR signal change solely due to the bubble radius change. The bubbles’ contribution to the relaxation rate before and after applying sub-atmospheric pressure changes was estimated and its echo time dependence modelled, so as to inform the mean radius change. The periodic subatmospheric pressure change was further applied until the MR signal change was only due to the bubble radius change. An excellent MR sensitivity of 28 % bar-1 is demonstrated, bubble radii of 2.4 and 1.8 μm are numerically estimated before and after the application of pressure, and the simulations are further used to estimate the optimum bubble radius maximising the MR sensitivity to a small change in radius.

Although flowing foams are used in a variety of technologies, foam rheology is still incompletely understood. In this paper we demonstrate the use of a velocity-sensitised magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sequence for the study of flowing foam. We employ a constant-time (pure phase encode) imaging technique, SPRITE, which is immune to geometrical distortions caused by the foam-induced magnetic field inhomogeneity. The sample magnetisation is prepared before the SPRITE imaging with the Cotts 13-interval motion-sensitisation sequence, which is also insensitive to the effects of the foam heterogeneity. We measure the development of a power-law velocity profile in the foam downstream of a Venturi constriction (in which the cross-section of the tube decreases by 89% in area) in a vertical, cylindrical pipe.

We propose a method that allows probing quantitatively the individual saturations of crudeoil/brine/mud-filtrate mixtures during imbibition-drainage experiments on a petroleum rock-system. The experiments have been also performed at different temperature and pressure conditions.

We used NMR techniques to probe the anisotropic properties of stretched Nafion®115membranes. The alignment of the polymeric structure under a uniaxial load is at the origin of a strong anisotropy of both the water self-diffusion coefficient and the proton conductivity. The determination of these two important membrane properties may lead to new fundamental information on the nature of the proton transport mechanisms in such oriented weaklycharged systems.

Relaxation Exchange Spectroscopy (REXSY) has not previously been performed on samples containing different liquids. We present a pulse sequence that combines a Pulsed Gradient Spin Echo with REXSY, which we call PGSE-REXSY. Using this pulse sequence it is possible to separate the signals from two liquid components, here oil and water, simultaneously present within a sample due to the difference in diffusion properties. A REXSY analysis can then be performed on the individual liquids. The technique is very relevant to applications in petroleum research, and could potentially be used to determine how the mobility of one liquid is influenced by the presence of the other. We also show that compared to a two-dimensional Inverse Laplace Transform, a discrete multi-exponential component model is more robust when performing a quantitative analysis of REXSY data.

The convergence of the long-time apparent diffusion tensor of diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) to the effective diffusion tensor obtained by mathematical homogenization theory was considered for two-compartment geometric models containing non-elongated cells of general shapes. A numerical study was conducted in two and three dimensions to demonstrate this convergence as a function of the diffusion time.

Diffusion of water molecules in the human brain tissue has strong similarities with diffusion in porous media. It is affected by different factors such as restrictions and compartmentalization, interaction with membrane walls, strong anisotropy imposed by cellular microstructure, etc. However, multiple artefacts abound in in vivo measurements either from subject motions, such as cardiac pulsation, bulk head motion, respiratory motion, and involuntary tics and tremor, or hardware related problems, such as table vibrations, etc. All these artefacts can substantially degrade the resulting images and render postprocessing diffusion analysis difficult or even impossible. In order to overcome these problems, we have developed a robust and efficient approach based on the least trimmed squares algorithm that works well with severely degraded datasets with low signal-to-noise ratio. This approach has been compared with other diffusion imaging post-processing algorithms using simulations and in vivo experiments. We demonstrate that the least trimmed squares algorithm can be easily adopted for multiple non-Gaussian diffusion models such as the biexponential model. The developed approach is shown to exhibit a high efficiency and accuracy and can, in principle, be exploited in other diffusion studies where artefact/outlier suppression is demanded.

Dispersion remains, today, a highly topical subject. Our group has been interested in characterizing this phenomenon by pulsed-field-gradient NMR technique. Direct measurement of the dispersion coefficient can be done with a Pulsed Gradient Spin Echo (PGSE) sequence by assuming that the asymptotic regime is reached. In unsteady state, the propagator formalism is used. To better understand these measurements, the NMR experiment is modeled using a stochastic simulation (random walks) and compared with experimental results. The comparison is made for the simple case of Poiseuille flow in a circular tube (Taylor-Aris dispersion).