Patent ID: 8547096

Claim:
A method for quantifying bitumen and/or water in a sample comprising bitumen, water and solids using a time-domain nuclear magnetic resonance pulse spectrometer, comprising the steps of: (a) initially saturating the magnetization of the sample so that essentially no magnetization remains in the +Z axis; (b) subjecting the sample to a sequence of radio-frequency pulses optimized for the measurement of bitumen and water in the sample; (c) allowing the recording of the transverse relaxation (T 2 ) echo trains after incremental longitudinal relaxation to produce a raw TD-NMR data set for the sample; and (d) providing a computer which has been programmed to determine and display the amount of bitumen and water in the sample by means of an optimized partial least squares chemometric model relating raw TD-NMR data sets obtained from a training set of samples comprising bitumen, water and solids to the training samples' corresponding reference values obtained from an analysis method for determining the quantity of bitumen and water.