We at Extra Byte will try and contribute to this process, mostly through software, helping (all) instrument makers develop applications suitable for their instruments. It is fun but it also takes a lot of work, so it looks like we might soon need help!

In my opinion, however, none of the TD-NMR instrument makers will strike gold just because they can build an instrument. That used to be sufficient up to, maybe, two decades ago, but today what matters most are very specific, worked-out applications. For example, it is not enough to say that "NMR can be used in food industry". One needs to detail what for (and how) it can be applied. Potentially, there could be hundreds of applications in the food industry (and in many other areas), but each of them needs to be studied in depth - and that can easily take months to do it properly. Just pointing out that something "could be done" is no longer sufficient.

As I said, interesting new instruments of this type start appearing ever more often. Another recent addition to the list that comes to my mind is the NMR relaxometer from Lab-Tools :

The shot below shows Ester Maria Vasini (my Extra Byte colleague) focused on the search for the magnet's sweet spot of a Spin Track instrument at Resonance Systems . It illustrates nicely the idea of a modern low-field, LR-NMR hardware. The core of the instrument is the magnet (under Ester's hands), the probe (in her hands) and the digital chip at the center of the green printed board in the Spin Track console box. Plus the software to run and evaluate the experiments, of course.

Most of the new instruments are table-top, all are based on a single digital control board, including frequency synthesis, pulser, RF receivers, etc, and all are PC-friendly. Only the prices are not yet as low as I hoped 10 years ago, though they are moving in the right direction.

The array of relatively low-cost, FPGA-based time-domain and relaxometry NMR instruments available on the market is on the rise ( click here for a hopefully complete list ). It pleases me since it falls nicely in line with the talk I gave at the 2009 Valtice NMR meeting (click on the image on the left).

September 1, 2019

Hint:







JSON

with Base64

craftfully adapted

to scientific data

in a versatile way

???