The decay behavior of the signal can also serve to characterize the authenticity of the sample. For crystalline materials, changes in crystal packing due to processing have been found to correlate well with x-ray powder diffraction measurements. A pulsed NMR instrument presents no adverse health risks, therefore it can be a preferred technique in production environment.
TD-NMR instruments are proton counting instruments. Since each hydrogen (1H) responds the same as other hydrogens regardless of the structure (unlike methods like UV-Visible), TD-NMR is excellent for characterizing mixtures.