Nuclear magnetic relaxation of liquids in porous media

Nuclear magnetic relaxation is useful for probing physical and chemical properties of liquids in porous media. Examples are given on high surface area porous materials including calibrated porous silica glasses, granular packings, plaster pastes, cement-based materials and natural porous materials, such as sandstone and carbonate rocks. Here, we outline our recent NMR relaxation work for these very different porous materials. For instance, low field NMR relaxation of water in calibrated granular packings leads to striking different pore-size dependencies of the relaxation times T1 and T2 when changing the amount of surface paramagnetic impurities. This allows separation of the diffusion and surface limited regimes of relaxation in these macroporous media. The magnetic field dependence of the nuclear spin–lattice relaxation rate 1/T1(ω0) is also a rich source of dynamical information for characterizing the molecular dynamics of liquids in porous media. This allows a continuous characterization of the evolving microstructure of various cementitious materials. Our recent applications of two-dimensional (2D) T1–T2 and T2-z-store-T2 correlation experiments have evidenced the water exchange in connected micropores of cement pastes. The direct probing of water adsorption time on a solid surface gives access to an original characterization of the surface nano-wettability of porous plaster pastes. We show that such a parameter depends directly on the physical chemistry of the pore surfaces. Lastly, we outline our recent measurements of wettability in oil/brine/reservoir carbonate rocks. New Journal of Physics 13 (2011) 035016 1367-2630/11/035016+26$33.00 © IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft