Effect of magnetic pore surface coating on the NMR relaxation and diffusion signal in quartz sand.

Magnetic impurities are ubiquitous in natural porous media such as sand and soil. They generate internal magnetic field gradients because of increased magnetic susceptibility differences between solid and liquid phase in the pore space and because of the presence of magnetic centers. These internal gradients accelerate NMR relaxation rates and thus might limit the possibility of pore space characterization using NMR. In this study, we investigate the effects of coating the surface of natural sands by the antiferromagnetic iron oxyhydroxide goethite on NMR relaxation and diffusion properties. We found a non-quadratic dependence of the relaxation time distributions on the echo time indicating that the relaxation experiments were not performed in the fast diffusion limit, while the weak dependence on the external magnetic field strength is explained by the preponderance of the surface relaxation over the effect of diffusion in internal gradients. The surface to volume ratio of the pore space, determined by NMR diffusimetry ((S/V) ) remains approximately constant, whereas the same quantity, determined from gas adsorption ((S/V) ) increases proportional to the coating density. This is because gas adsorption measures surface roughness on sub-nanometer scale, whereas NMR diffusimetry averages over structures smaller than few microns. This has consequences for the calculation of the surface relaxivities. The usage of the (S/V) leads to constant values, whereas the usage of (S/V) leads to apparently decreasing relaxivities with increasing coating, which is unrealistic. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.