B Luy reports in Angew Chem, Int ed 2011, 50, 2, 354 the prospects of portable proton NMR.  In this ‘highlights’ paper the author comments on the current status, remarking that at elats oe group has designed and built a 30MHz machine wherein the magnet weighs about 3kg and the is about the size of a tea mug.

Luy concludes that low-field high resolution NMR spectroscopy is advancing rapidly and a prototype 20MHz tabletop NMR spectrometer has been built.

Further, I happened upon a similar ‘highlights’ article by T McCreedy in Chemistry and Industry, 2011, issue 7, 11 April, page 28 wherein he writes about the use of portable NMR detection coupled to capillary electrophoresis (CE).  He remarks that an NMR instrument the size of a brief case has been made and interfaced to a CE instrument enabling separation of analytes and NMR detection (using ¹⁹F in this case) to detect perfluorotributylamine down to 31nmol in solution.

It makes me wonder how long it could be before we have other common analytical devices miniaturised and portable, much as is happening with the ‘lab on a chip’ movement for rapidly assessing flow chemistry on very small scales, coupled to processing steps such as phase separation (eg those used by the group at i2Chem, a spin-off from the MIT in USA).