Water Signal Suppression in NMR Spectroscopy

The area of solvent suppression has a long history and is an indispensable part of almost every NMR experiment conducted in a solvent containing nuclei of the type to be detected. This chapter provides a general coverage of solvent suppression methodr in NMR with special attention to the enormous developments in the past decade that have occurred due to the widespread usage of magnetic field gradients and shaped RF pulses. The general considerations and instrumental complications associated with the presence of a large signal are first discussed. The complications resulting from the radiation damping and demagnetizing fiela3 are considered in some detail since their effects are becoming more manifest with the increasingly higher field strengths available. The methods of solvent suppression are then covered including their application to multidimensional experiments. Brief coverage is also given to suppression in imaging experiments, experiments involving high-molecular-weight compounds and also ¹⁷O NMR.