NMR studies of hydrocarbon gas flow and dispersion

It is demonstrated that nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) flow imaging on the basis of phase encoding of flow velocities as well as NMR flow tagging can be successfully employed to visualize laminar but not necessarily fully developed flow of thermally polarized hydrocarbon gases at atmospheric pressure. Gas flow in the nonconsolidated bed composed of solid glass beads was characterized by the displacement NMR spectroscopy on the basis of pulsed-field-gradient-stimulatedecho NMR technique. The effective diffusivity values and aerodynamic dispersion coefficients on the time scale from milliseconds to hundreds of milliseconds were extracted from the experimental data. In a similar experiment with the beds composed of porous silica gel grains, strong adsorption of hydrocarbon gases was observed.