MQC… and now we bring you the ‘R’

24th March 2025 | Author: Rosie Jones

The 6th March marked a major milestone for the NMR team and the wider Materials Analysis group at Oxford Instruments – we launched a new product, MQC-R, to the market. This is our first major product launch since the Magnetic Resonance business moved to the Oxford Instruments site in High Wycombe and since I joined the NMR team in July 2023, and I am absolutely delighted to see it come to fruition.

What is the product, and what can it do?

MQC-R is a benchtop, time domain nuclear magnetic resonance (TD-NMR) instrument, which can be used to characterise composition, molecular mobility and structure in a wide range of materials, including food, polymers, pharmaceuticals, battery materials, and cosmetics, to name but a few. The ‘R’ in the name stands for ‘research’ and this new instrument complements our existing benchtop TD-NMR product, the MQC+. The MQC+ is largely used for quality control and assurance (QC/QA) applications, such as measuring solid fat content in edible oils/fats and spin finish on synthetic fibres, but the MQC-R has been designed specifically with researchers in mind.

It delivers some benefits that are highly desirable for researchers in both academia and industrial settings, for example:

• Flexibility: MQC-R brings unique, interchangeable NMR probes enabling researchers and those running core/multi-user facilities to easily switch between sample sizes (1-14 ml volume), nuclei, and variable temperature options.​

• Highly configurable and upgradable: Modular hardware, alongside different software packages, allows for configurations to meet the researchers needs, as well as upgrades if requirements change​.

• High performance: MQC-R performs time-efficient TD-NMR analysis using a sensitive 23 MHz magnet, and short dead time probes for measuring solid, typically organic, materials. In addition, we have worked together with Green Imaging, to deliver advanced acquisition and data processing options in new software - NMR ProLab.

And for researchers interested in developing more advanced QA/QC measurements and applications, the pulsed field gradient NMR capability of MQC-R, enables it to perform measurements such as droplet size distribution in emulsions. My colleagues in our product science and applications team have put together a technical note detailing this application, which you can find here.

If you are interested in seeing more, check out our short, animated video highlighting the top 5 features of the MQC-R:

I hope you have enjoyed reading about our new product development and launch. If you would like to know more, please get in touch with us.

We will also be presenting MQC-R at various conferences, events and NMR-focused meetings this year, including ACS Spring and ENC – please look out for this and come to speak to us. We would be delighted to see you.