In 2016, a new solid-state NMR centre was founded at KU Leuven Chem&Tech. The NMR dedicated facility implements a series of optimizations to create an ultra-stable environment, optimal for high-resolution NMR spectroscopy. At present this initiative has evolved into an NMR/X-ray platform operating as convergent research node with focus on energy, molecular water research, food and health research. The centre now houses 6 spectrometers with fields ranging from 300 MHz to 800MHz, highlights being 500 Mhz and 800 MHz spectrometers, each with unique capabilities for multi-irradiation. The 800 MHz spectrometer was acquired in a consortium with Bruker, to develop sensitivity-enhanced high resolution NMR for different application areas. The NMR centre @Leuven Chem&Tech provides research spectrometer time to both internal and external users (from industry and academia, national and international) using a proposal-based allocation system similar to those operated at synchrotron beaml!
ines.
Recently, a strategic alliance was initiated with the new Center for Molecular Water Science (CMWS) currently being launched at the DESY light-source campus in Hamburg; By coupling existing and operational large scale instruments (@DESY: Petra III, FLASH, XFEL and @KU Leuven: NMR) in a multidisciplinary, convergent approach the center aims to solve major long-standing issues in water research.
Specific spear points of the NMR centres research are solid-state parallel acquisition, sensitivity enhancement by hyperpolarization via magnetization transfer from para hydrogen, investigation of porous materials and their interaction with guest molecules, molecular water research and high-field high-resolution NMR for food and health science.
Recent highlights include the absolute quantification of water in microporous materials,[1] investigations of competitive adsorption in microporous materials,[2][3] the development of polarisation enhanced 13C-DOSY for investigation of biomolecules such as water soluble arabinoxylans,[4] parahydrogen based hyperpolarisation of water, discriminative analysis of aluminas using 3D correlation of the 27Al chemical shift and its quadrupolar parameters.[5]
[1] Houlleberghs, M. et al. Absolute Quantification of Water in Microporous Solids with 1H Magic Angle Spinning NMR and Standard Addition. Anal. Chem. 89, 69406943 (2017).
[2] Radhakrishnan, S. et al. In Situ Solid-State 13C NMR Observation of Pore Mouth Catalysis in Etherification of β-Citronellene with Ethanol on Zeolite Beta. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 138, 28022808 (2016).
[3] Kubarev, A. V et al. Solvent Polarity-Induced Pore Selectivity in H-ZSM-5 Catalysis. ACS Catal. 7, 42484252 (2017).
[4] Van Vaneeckhaute, E. et al. Polarisation enhanced 13C-DOSY and Relaxation Ordered Spectroscopy, a NMR toolbox for characterisation of biomolecules. In preparation.
[5] Breynaert, E. et al., Reversible hyperpolarisation of water with parahydrogen. In preparation. [6] C. Vinod Chandran et al. Alumina: discriminative analysis using 3D correlation of solid-state NMR parameters. Chem. Soc. Rev., In publication, DOI: 10.1039/c8cs00321a (2018)
