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The detection of nuclear radiation necessitates the availability of new generations of tunable blue emitting fluorophores with high emission quantum yields. Here we show that pyridyl-1,2,4-triazole based diphenyl boron complexes can provide highly tuneable emission through facile modification of the C5 position of the 1,2,4-triazolato ring. The series of complexes prepared show a wide range of emission from near-UV to green, enabling fine control over the spectral overlap with detectors used in scintillator technology.

A lightweight Halbach magnet system for use in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) studies on drill cores was designed and built. It features an improved homogeneous magnetic field with a strength of 0.22 T and a maximum accessible sensitive volume. Additionally, it is furnished with a sliding table for automatic scans of cylindrical samples. This device is optimized for nondestructive online measurements of porosity and pore size distributions of water-saturated full cylindrical and split semicylindrical drill cores of different diameters. The porosity of core plugs with diameters from 20 to 80 mm can be measured routinely using exchangeable radiofrequency coils. Advanced NMR techniques that provide 2D T(1)-T(2) correlations with an average measurement time of 30 min and permeability estimates can be performed with a special insert suitable for small core plugs with diameter and length of 20 mm.

The distribution of coke residues inside porous catalyst pellets was investigated on the molecular as well as the macroscopic scale. The presence of coke on the pore surface affects the relaxation properties of adsorbed liquid species; these were determined by field-cycling relaxometry for different polar and nonpolar liquids in metal-doped and metal-free catalyst carrier materials. The presence of metal in the Al2O3 matrix had only a minor influence on the dispersion behavior, while the interaction of the adsorbates with the coke layer leads to considerable changes in the relaxation times at low Larmor frequencies. Lowering the temperature to well below the bulk freezing point of dimethyl sulfoxide resulted in a slightly stronger frequency dependence of T1. Not only relaxation times but also the diffusion coefficient is affected by the presence of coke residues in the pores. For macroscopically heterogeneous samples, they offer the possibility to generate maps of the local coke concentration by introducing appropriate filters into NMR imaging sequences. High-temperature regeneration of coked catalysts leads to such heterogeneous distributions which is visualized by T1 parameter imaging.