MRI - Navier
The MRI facility at laboratoire Navier is a 40 cm wide prototype system operating at 0.5 Teslas on hydrogen and florine nuclei. It is owned by IFSTTAR, and is managed technically and financially by the team ‘Physics of Porous Media’ at laboratoire Navier. It is dedicated to research studies in material and environmental sciences. Its technical characteristics are optimized for heterogeneous and voluminous samples.
MRI is mainly used to study the transport of water and chemicals in porous media, the setting of hydraulic binders, and flow properties of ‘complex’ fluids. It has been equipped over years with various experimental setups able to create mechanical, thermal and hydric solicitation of samples directly inside the magnet: mechanical press, air blower, cooling cell, rheometer… A team of researchers and engineers specialized in MRI develops the necessary methodology -NMR sequencing- and data processing on purpose of each sample.
A MRI is first and foremost a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectrometer (NMR). It uses intense magnetic fields to manipulate the magnetic properties of atom nuclei and probe various sample characteristics. The point of MRI is its additional ability to locate measurements in space. The range of measured an/or imaged information is wide: chemical (which molecule, and where ?), physicochemical (which diffusion coefficient, is the sample solid or liquid ?), textural (pore size distribution in a porous sample) or dynamical (velocity field in a flow) with the additional possibility to measure correlations between all these aspects.
Main technical features
- Model : Bruker 24/80 DBX
- Magnet : vertical, 0.5T, 40cm inner diameter
- Gradients : from 0.005 to 0.03 T/m
- Nuclei : 1H and 19F
Contact
Benjamin Maillet : benjamin.maillet@ifsttar.fr