Berkeley Scientists Bring MRI/NMR to Microreactors.

Byline: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

BERKELEY, Calif., Jan. 28 (AScribe Newswire) -- In a significant step towards improving the design of future catalysts and catalytic reactors, especially for microfluidic "lab-on-a-chip" devices, researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) at Berkeley, have successfully applied magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to the study of gas-phase reactions on the microscale.

Under the leadership of Alexander Pines, faculty senior scientist in Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and the Glenn T. Seaborg Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley, a team of researchers that included chemists Louis Bouchard and Scott Burt have developed a technique in which parahydrogen-polarized gas is used to make an MRI signal strong enough to provide direct visualization of the gas-phase flow of active catalysts in packed-bed microreactors. This work, the first application of gas-phase MRI to microfluidic catalysis, shows that parahydrogen-enhanced MRI can be used to track gases and liquids in microfluidic devices as well as in the void spaces of a tightly packed catalyst reactor bed.

"This is the first time hyperpolarized gas has been used to directly study catalytic reaction products on such a small scale and without …