Patent Document ID: 20110316534
Application ID: 12823022
Patent Flag: 0

Claim One:
1. 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) determining the amount of bitumen and water by means of a partial least squares optimization based 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 a standard analysis method for determining bitumen and water.