Applications

One of the strongest assets of single-sided NMR is that it works with samples of almost any size or shape. That flexibility takes our work in two directions at once: industrial materials, where in situ analysis is useful for quality control, and cultural heritage, where a large canvas painting can’t be cut into pieces for traditional chemical analysis.

Paints and epoxies are a major part of this work. Both are materials whose properties depend on where you look and when — on proximity to a surface, and on how far along the drying or curing process a sample happens to be — and both are difficult to sample without disturbing them, which makes single-sided NMR a natural fit. In 2020, we showed that the cure kinetics of epoxies differ within just a few microns of a substrate relative to the bulk material (Journal of Polymer Science, 2020), work that grew out of a collaboration with the coatings company Metna Co. We also explored how acrylic paint binder adsorbs to pigment particles at different pigment concentrations (Magnetic Resonance in Chemistry, 2020). Later, we followed up with a study of solvent exchange among the distinct chemical environments that form as acrylic paint dries (Progress in Organic Coatings, 2023) and compared NMR-based and calorimetry-based measurements of epoxy cure kinetics (Journal of Polymer Science, 2026). Each of these papers has a different W&M student as its first author.

Our regional collaborations — with Colonial Williamsburg, Historic Jamestowne, and local public archaeology groups — cost little and reliably turn into real student projects with samples that exist nowhere else. Our industrial partnerships bring something different: real deadlines, real samples, and a view of research outside the university for our students.