Micro-NMR System

 

 

Overview

 

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) is widely used in medical diagnostics and chemical analysis. Due to rapid growing of the NMR applications, the conventional NMR systems may not fulfill the need of all applications. For example, in some applications of chemical or biological analysis, such as microspectroscopy and NMR-detected microseparation, the test samples are very small—typical volume is around or below a microliter. The microliter-volume sample brings up a challenge in NMR system design because the signal-to-noise ratio in an NMR system is linearly dependent on the volume of the sample. It is necessary to develop a micro-NMR device that can exploit a volume-limited sample very efficiently as the existing NMR devices are usually designed for larger samples where the SNR is not the major design constraint. We also hope the development of a highly integrated micro-NMR device could further expand the application realm of NMR because conventional NMR equipment, including desktop NMR equipment, are relatively large and their applications are limited because of the size.

 

Publication

·         Wen-Chieh Lin and Gary Fedder,  A Comparison of Induction-Detection NMR and Force-Detection NMR on Micro-NMR Device Design, Technical Report, CMU-RI-TR-01-06, Carnegie Mellon University, 2001.

Links

·         Kevin Frederick implemented a Force-Detection NMR Sensor based on the analysis of this report.

·         NMR information server

·         The basics of NMR by J. P. Honak at RIT.

·         Magnetic Resonace Engineering Laboratory at UIUC.

·         Microsystems Design Group at EPFL.