The NMRI/NMR platform of the Navier laboratory has been using and developing nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques for 20 years to characterise materials in civil engineering and the environment. Well known for its applications in medical imaging (MRI), NMR also allows access, in a non-invasive, non-destructive way and with little constraints and preparation on the sample, to various physico-chemical properties as well as to analytical information (relaxometry and spectroscopy) and imaging. Well adapted to intermediate scales between the atomic and macroscopic scales, it allows to obtain information that significantly improves the understanding of chemical, physical or biological phenomena on systems such as porous media or rheology.

More specifically, the Navier laboratory has acquired a worldwide reputation thanks to original developments and uses of MRI, more recently of low field NMR, and in the future of Mouse NMR on topics of interest such as the study - qualitative and quantitative - of porous media, fluid flow or rheology, possibly in motion. In addition to its great versatility, MRI and NMR are distinguished by specific types of selectivity insofar as they rely on relaxation time measurements depending on many physicochemical parameters such as molecular dynamics, the presence of paramagnetic constituents, temperature etc. giving access to porometry, diffusometry or velocimetry studies. Moreover, thanks to the recently acquired Mouse NMR, in situ relaxation time measurements can be performed allowing to investigate even more towards the real world.