Fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics in packed beds are an important area of study with many applications in industry including design of catalytic beds and thermal heat storage units. Understanding of fluid flow and heat transfer at the pore scale is lacking due to the difficulty obtaining velocity and energy transport measurements in opaque systems. The use of macro scale...
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) allows for non-invasive measurement of the dynamics of liquids in complex porous structures. In high-field NMR, measurement of restricted molecular motion and changes in magnetic relaxation times can characterize pore size and connectivity. Molecular diffusion measurements are utilized to identify the restricted motion of water after ingress into the pore...
Understanding root water uptake is indispensable for the optimization of plant growth and crop yield against the background of growing world population. One strategy to understand how root water uptake functions is the knowledge of water flow from bulk soil to the root, passing the root-soil interface: the bottleneck for water uptake. Whereas direct flow imaging of fluxes in the above-ground...
19F magnetic resonance has become a popular method in the medical field for quantifying oxygenation in blood, tissues, and tumors. The technique, called 19F NMR oximetry, exploits the strong affinity of molecular oxygen for liquid fluorocarbon phases, and the resulting strong linear dependence of 19F spin-lattice relaxation rate R1 on local oxygen concentration. The success of 19F NMR oximetry...
NMR cryoporometry, relaxometry and diffusiometry are widely used for the characterization of porous materials.[1,2,3] In this work we investigated resorcinol-formaldehyde (RF) based carbon aerogels, prepared in different ways, with all the three NMR techniques parallel in aqueous medium. This made possible the comprehensive characterization of the aerogels concerning pore size and shape, pore...
With fresh water becoming scarcer, especially in developing countries, there is a tendency to use sea water for making concrete. Hence, more information on the effect of Na and Cl ions needed on the hydration. During the hydration both types of ions can be chemically bound to cement components, as hydrates are being formed [e.g., Friedel’s salt Ca2Al(OH)6Cl2H2O]. Especially free chloride ions...
A knowledge of fluid saturation at any one cross-section is very often required when studying fluid behaviour in porous media. It becomes more challenging in case of micro-scale geometry with heterogeneous morphology, as in complex geological samples. Our research effort in solving the challenge has led to a novel solution. We named this new saturation measurement identification approach,...
The liquid-blocking effect occurs as the reservoir pressure drops below the dew point, which could increase liquid saturation, decrease flow efficiency and relative permeability, further leading to a sharp decline in production. Gas-wetting alteration has been an effective measure to enhance oil and gas recovery by improving flow efficiency in the blocking area. In this paper, we reported a...
In this study, the drying behavior for a variety of calcium alumina- and hydratable alumina-bonded refractory castables was investigated in the temperature regime of first-drying, i.e., up to 300 oC. Using a specialized high-temperature Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) setup, we were able to directly and non-destructively measure the spatially and temporally resolved moisture distribution,...
Laboratory measurements, i.e. gas (N$_2$) porosity and permeability, time-domain nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) including transverse relaxation time (T$_2$) and diffusion coefficient, and thin section and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analysis, were conducted to obtain petrographical and petrophysical descriptions of the Weber Sandstone and Madison Limestone at the Rock Spring Uplift, a...
