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Updated: Jun 28, 2026

Quantifying Mixing using Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Published on: January 25, 2012
Flow in porous metallic materials: a magnetic resonance imaging study
Shoujun Xu1, Elad Harel, David J Michalak
1Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
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.
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