Carbonaceous Materials Porosity Investigation in a Wet State by Low-Field NMR Relaxometry

The porosity of differently wetted carbonaceous material with disordered mesoporosity was investigated using low-field (1)H NMR relaxometry. Spin–spin relaxation (relaxation time T(2)) was measured using the CPMG pulse sequence. We present a non-linear optimization method for the conversion of relaxation curves to the distribution of relaxation times by using non-specialized software. Our procedure consists of searching for the number of components, relaxation times, and their amplitudes, related to different types of hydrogen nuclei in the sample wetted with different amounts of water (different water-to-carbon ratio). We found that a maximum of five components with different relaxation times was sufficient to describe the observed relaxation. The individual components were attributed to a tightly bounded surface water layer (T(2) up to 2 ms), water in small pores especially supermicropores (2 < T(2) < 7 ms), mesopores (7 < T(2) < 20 ms), water in large cavities between particles (20–1500 ms), and bulk water surrounding the materials (T(2) > 1500 ms). To recalculate the distribution of relaxation times to the pore size distribution, we calculated the surface relaxivity based on the results provided by additional characterization techniques, such as thermoporometry (TPM) and N(2)/−196 °C physisorption.