Water/moisture and fat analysis by time-domain NMR

Time-domain nuclear magnetic resonance (TD-NMR) is widely used within food industries for QC/QA applications. Precise determination of moisture and water is of fundamental interest. To determine moisture and water in the presence of lipids, the minispec makes use of differences in their respective NMR relaxation properties. The minispec applications analysing bound water are well-known and have become International standard methods. Different methods to analyse food samples with high water content or free water, like some dairy products, are addressed in this paper. Explicitly, the well-known pre-drying methods are compared to NMR diffusion experiments and a combined relaxation time analysis. Finally the single-sided NMR approach is discussed to analyse packages food.