Author(s)

Juan Manuel Navarrete, Gustavo Leonardo Martínez

Faculty of Chemistry, Inorganic and Nuclear Chemistry Department, National University of Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico.
National Coordination to Restore the Cultural Inheritance, National Institute of Anthropology and History, Mexico City, Mexico.

Aging of ancient raw materials usually finish with disintegration, which starts on surface of walls to progress toward the inside mass of a huge variety of mineral compounds. This is particularly harmful when antique buildings keep mural paintings, which suffers destruction before the wall itself. Same case appears on sculptures and monuments, whose surfaces are often attacked by living organisms which start a deterioration process previous to complete disintegration. The main factor to produce these unwanted effects is humidity, either rain for materials exposed to open air, or underground humidity going up by capillarity of minerals, in this case represented by porosity of associated salts forming the material. This paper describes a method to measure easily the relative porosity of diverse raw materials at laboratory level, by using a radioactive labeled solution, and also a procedure to reduce their porosity of those minerals. The efficiency of this procedure is measured in the same way, and so the results obtained at laboratory level have encouraged its use at real scale, where it has been quite successful for a number of materials in a limited span of five years.

Consolidation; Preservation; Humidity; Ancient; Materials

J. Manuel Navarrete and G. Leonardo Martínez, "Consolidation of Ancient Raw Materials Using a Reversible, Elastic, Soft Polymer," Advances in Materials Physics and Chemistry, Vol. 2 No. 1, 2012, pp. 37-42. doi: 10.4236/ampc.2012.21006.