T1 Relaxation of Methane in Mixtures with Gaseous Water

Synthetic, ecofriendly fuels and chemicals can be produced through Power-To-X (PtX) processes. To study such catalytic processes operando and spatially resolved, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a versatile tool. A main issue in the application of MRI in reactive studies is a lack of knowledge about how the gathered signals can be interpreted into reaction data like temperature or species concentration. In this work, the interaction of methane and gaseous water is studied regarding their longitudinal relaxation time T₁ and the chemical shift. To this end, defined quantities of methane-water mixtures were sealed in glass tubes and probed at temperatures between 130 and 360 °C and pressures from 6 to 20 bar. From the obtained T₁ relaxation times, the collision cross section of methane with water σ_j,CH4-H2O is derived, which can be used to estimate the temperature and molar concentration of methane during the methanation reaction. The obtained T₁ relaxation times can additionally be used to improve the timing of MRI sequences involving water vapor or methane. Further, details about the measurement workflow and tube preparation are shared.