Multi-scales nuclear spin relaxation of liquids in porous media

The magnetic field dependence of the nuclear spin-lattice relaxation rate 1/T-1 (omega(0)) is a rich source of dynamical information for characterizing the molecular dynamics of liquids in confined environments. Varying the magnetic field changes the Larmor frequency omega(0), and thus the fluctuations to which the nuclear spin relaxation is sensitive. Moreover, this method permits a more complete characterization of the dynamics than the usual measurements as a function of temperature at fixed magnetic field strength, because many common solvent liquids have phase transitions that may alter significantly the character of the dynamics over the temperature range usually studied. Further, the magnetic field dependence of the spin-lattice relaxation rate, 1/T-1 (omega(0)), provides a good test of the theories that relate the measurement to the microdynamical behavior of the liquid. This is especially true in spatially confined systems where the effects of reduced dimensionality may force more frequent reencounters of the studied proton spin-bearing molecules with paramagnetic impurities at the pore surfaces that may alter the correlation functions that enter the relaxation equations in a fundamental way. We show by low field NMR relaxation that changing the amount of surface paramagnetic impurities leads to striking different pore-size dependences of the relaxation times T-1 and T-2 of liquids in pores. Here, we focus mainly on high surface area porous materials including calibrated porous silica glasses, granular packings, heterogeneous catalytic materials, cement-based materials and natural porous materials such as clay minerals and rocks. Recent highlights NMR relaxation works are reviewed for these porous materials, like continuous characterization of the evolving microstructure of various cementitious materials and measurement of wettability in reservoir carbonate rocks. Although, the recent applications of 2-dimensional T-1-T-2 and T-2-z-store-T-2 correlation experiments for characterization of water exchange in connected micropores of cement pastes are also outlined. (C) 2010 Academie des sciences. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.