Flow in porous metallic materials: a magnetic resonance imaging study

Purpose: To visualize flow dynamics of analytes inside porous metallic materials with laser-detected magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Materials and methods: We examine the flow of nuclear-polarized water in a porous stainless steel cylinder. Laser-detected MRI utilizes a sensitive optical atomic magnetometer as the detector. Imaging was performed in a remote-detection mode: the encoding was conducted in the Earth's magnetic field, and detection is conducted downstream of the encoding location. Conventional MRI (7T) was also performed for comparison.

Results: Laser-detected MRI clearly showed MR images of water flowing through the sample, whereas conventional MRI provided no image.

Conclusion: We demonstrated the viability of laser-detected MRI at low-field for studying porous metallic materials, extending MRI techniques to a new group of systems that is normally not accessible to conventional MRI.