Determination of Water and Oil in Contaminated Coastal Sand by Low-Field Hydrogen-1 Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (¹H NMR)

Abstract

This study presents a low-field hydrogen-1 nuclear magnetic resonance (¹H NMR) method to accurately determine water and oil in oil-contaminated coastal sand. Rapid, efficient separation of water and oil signals in the overlapping transverse relaxation (T₂) spectra was achieved using a novel approach combining physical (paramagnetic ions Mn²⁺) and mathematical separation (deconvolution algorithm). High correlation coefficients of 0.998 and 0.982 were obtained between the prepared and NMR determined contents for water and oil together with the maximum errors of 0.84% and 0.54% for the water and oil content separately, which suggests NMR measurement of water and oil contents in oil-contaminated coastal sand is fairly accurate.

Keywords:

• Deconvolution algorithm
• hydrogen-1 nuclear magnetic resonance (1H NMR
• oil and water contents
• oil-contaminated coastal sands)
• paramagnetic ions
• transverse relaxation

Additional information

Funding

The authors would like to thank the financial support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51974342), the Education Quality Improvement Project for Graduate Student of Shandong Province (SDYY17021), and the Student's Platform for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Training Program (201910425054).