Environmental monitoring in the cultural heritage field⋆

Abstract

Abstract.Environmental conditions significantly affect the conservation state of the cultural heritage artefacts. Temperature and relative humidity are directly related to the degradation of multimateric artefacts both stored in indoor sites and exposed to outdoor conditions. Furthermore, the presence of aggressive gases in the atmosphere can have harmful effects on the long-lasting preservation of cultural heritage assets. Therefore, an effective and flexible environmental monitoring system is often required in order to assess if the environmental conditions are suitable for the proper conservation of the artefacts or if some specific action has to be taken for their safeguard. However, several constraints are involved in the design and deployment of environmental monitoring systems to be installed in cultural heritage sites, such as reliability of the system and data quality, operative life, real-time operation, maintenance cost, sensor size and communication range. The proposed monitoring system has been specifically developed for the cultural heritage field trying to achieve a good trade-off among all of these constraints. Nevertheless, its characteristics and flexibility make it suitable for many other applications. The proposed system has been employed in several monitoring campaigns in Italy and abroad. As an example of its application, data acquired during a campaign held in Colombia, are reported in the paper.