Chapter 3: Sensitivity Enhancement in Environmental NMR: Current Technologies and Future Potential

NMR is without a doubt a powerful tool to improve our understanding of the environment but has yet to proliferate through environmental chemistry as a broadly used analytical technique. This chapter discusses approaches to overcome the most significant limitation of environmental NMR: low sensitivity. While great strides to enhance sensitivity have been made and applied to other fields of NMR, most have yet to be applied to environmental samples. Despite this, many modern techniques such as improved NMR hardware, the use of sophisticated hyperpolarization techniques and the implementation of pulse sequences that increase the information density (and thus the overall throughput of the NMR experiment) present promising options to study the environment. A brief introduction to these three areas of sensitivity enhancement is given in this chapter, along with explanations of the underlying theory and examples of how these approaches could be applied to environmental NMR.