NMR imaging of thermal convection patterns.

Two special magnetic resonance imaging techniques were applied to the Rayleigh/Bénard problem of thermal convection for the first time. The methods were tested using a water cell with horizontal bottom and top covers kept at different temperatures with a downward gradient. Using Fourier encoding velocity imaging (FEVI) a five-dimensional image data set was recorded referring to two space dimensions of slice-selective images and all three components of the local velocity vector. On this basis, the fields of the velocity components or of the velocity magnitude were evaluated quantitatively and rendered as gray shade images. Furthermore the convection rolls were visualized with the aid of two- or three-dimensional multistripe/multiplane tagging imaging pulse sequences based on two or three DANTE combs for the space directions to be probed. Movies illustrating the fluid motions by convection in all three space dimensions were produced. It is demonstrated that the full spatial information of the convection rolls is accessible with microscopic resolution of typically 100 x 100 x 100 microns3. This resolution is effectively limited by flow displacements in the echo time, which should be well within the voxel dimension. The main perspective of this work is that the combined application of FEVI and multistripe/multiplane tagging imaging permits quantitative examinations of thermal convection for arbitrary boundary conditions and with imposed through-flow apart from the direct visualization of convective flow in the form of movies.