Superconducting NMR
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) has valuable applications in medicine, chemistry, and data acquisition for oil and gas and non-destructive testing. As with many other electromagnetic field devices, many NMR applications can benefit from improvements brought through the use of modern superconductors.
Medical
The medical field is currently the only home to a widespread commercial application of superconductors. While most people have never even heard of a superconductor, the acronym MRI has become common knowledge due to popularity resulting from benefits that superconductivity has provided through Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in medical diagnostics and biological science fields from anatomy to neuropsychology. All current MRI machines use first generation superconducting materials. Being metallic alloys, these materials are relatively easy to work with during manufacturing. However, they require very cold operating temperatures and the resulting devices have costly operating expenses. Second generation SC materials have higher operating temperatures but are much more delicate to handle during manufacturing. To date, this difficulty has been prohibitively complex to the commercial proliferation of wound second generation SC materials.
Infinity Physics winding technology will deliver cost reductions and even device size reductions in the medical field. Compact MRI (cMRITM) is a personnel portable compact, rugged, and reliable MRI medical device with local resolutions and most functions equivalent to large scale MRI machines. Using second generation SC materials, cMRITM brings forth the technical impact of the first commercial application compact and personnel portable yet high resolution MRI machine from hospital to field use.
Most likely beginning in the existing SC market of MRI machines, a revolution is coming and providing power and energy densities without the danger of exceptionally high rotational speeds. SC devices and especially commercially advantageous high temperature superconductor (HTS) devices are believed to be the only solution for moving electromagnetic applications beyond conventional conductor and permanent magnet limitations. Developing the first commercialized HTS device has the farther reaching technical impact across industries spanning potential $100B+ awaiting commercial SC solutions.
Surface NMR
Agriculture and land development industries have needs to detect water and other element compositions below ground. Surface Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (SNMR) is a non-invasive geophysics technique to remotely assess substrata content by taking measurements from above the surface. Currently even non-portable SNMR systems are limited to measurement penetration depths less than 0.25m. Even given the advances in post-processing of data to increase the signal-to-noise ratio, the field strength capable of being generated by a conventional magnet is not sufficient to characterize subsurface moisture content using equipment suitable for field measurements. Advances in superconductivity can now economically and reliably provide much higher magnetic field strengths and thereby offer a solution for the penetration depth for SNMR.
Infinity Physics winding technology will enable SNMR to offer an environmentally friendly approach to satisfying data acquisition demands in agriculture and land development applications. cSNMRTM is a device which draws from advances made in SNMR technology and replaces the conventional magnet with one made from superconducting material to produce a portable, rugged, and reliable measurement system for characterizing subsurface content at greater penetration depths and resolutions than previously possible.
Downhole NMR
The oil and gas industry currently use NMR to acquire sensor data of material composition down a drilled borehole. This technique is used in various applications including drilling a hole parallel to an existing hole. The requirement that NMR equipment be portable enough to fit down into the borehole has limited data acquisition to capabilities of low field NMR devices. Much higher fields from SC devices will expand opportunities in exploration and disaster recovery.