INTRODUCTION

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is probably the most flexible and powerful diagnostic imaging technique available to clinical medicine. MRI in material science promises to observe and quantify structure and dynamics evolving non-invasively as a function of treatment, processing, use or conditioning. However, such applications have been frustrated by the inability of traditional MRI techniques to observe the very short lived magnetic resonance signals typically encountered outside of the pure liquid state.

The UNB MRI Centre has invented a family of new MRI methods which permit the ready visualization of mobile and immobile ¹H containing structures not only in vivo, but in a large range of materials including concrete, polymers, composites, food materials and microporous solids. The successful application of our new MRI techniques, with allied hardware and software innovations, has opened entirely new vistas in material science research. The UNB MRI Centre is one of the largest and best known material science MRI laboratories world-wide and the leading university based laboratory of its type in North America. As the birthplace of the SPRITE MRI technique we are, by definition, one of the leading laboratories world-wide in many aspects of material science MRI. Our ideas and techniques are now being adopted by numerous academic and industrial research laboratories.