Magnetic resonance for fluids in porous media at the University of Bologna

Abstract

The magnetic resonance in porous media (MRPM) community is now a vast community of scientists from all over the world who recognize magnetic resonance as an instrument of choice for the characterization of pore space and of the distribution, diffusion and flow of fluids inside a vast range of different materials. The MRPM conferences are the occasions in which this community gets together, compares notes and grows. The scene was different in 1990, when this series of conferences was promoted at Bologna. I will go briefly over the history of these events, showing the role played by the University of Bologna and in particular by the intuition, ingenuity and passion of Giulio Cesare Borgia. The MRPM work at Bologna began in the mid-1980s. New correlations were found among parameters from NMR relaxation measurements and oil field parameters such as porosity, permeability to fluid flow, irreducible water saturation, residual oil saturation and pore-system surface-to-volume ratio, and fast algorithms were developed to give the different NMR parameters. Interest in valid interpretation of data led to extensive work also on the inversion of multiexponential relaxation data and the effects of inhomogeneous fields from susceptibility differences on distributions of relaxation times. In the last few years, extensive developments were made of combined magnetic resonance imaging and relaxation measurements in different fields.