The conservation of 20th and 21stcentury collections is paramount for the sustainable preservation of the National and European Cultural Heritage. It also secures an important economic impact, considering the income attained by museums and the local economies. This impact is likely to be further amplified in the forthcoming years due to the growth of the tourism sector. The presence of plastic materials such as poly(methyl methacrylate), polyurethane and rubber based plastics is ubiquitous in such collections. This situation raises novel challenges in devising future conservation efforts. Unfortunately, satisfactory solutions to this problem are yet to be established.
PlasCO2 will tackle the application of Supercritical Carbon Dioxide (CO2) to the cleaning of modern materials, with the ultimate aim of developing a novel green cleaning technology for the long-term preservation of 20th and 21st Century cultural heritage. Proof-of-concept for this technology has been achieved in recent years, however, fine-tuning such methods requires a multi-disciplinary team of natural?engineering-social sciences and humanities. PlasCO2 gathers experts from these fields that share a common motivation to implement such technological advances in an economically sustainable and environmentally friendly manner. In particular, the project will explore the cleaning of poly(methyl methacrylate) and polyurethane using supercritical CO2 at different conditions, and provide accurate measurements of the visual, chemical and thermo-physical properties of these materials before and after treatment. The data gathered within this project will provide new insights on how the properties and composition of these plastic materials relate to the outcome of different cleaning protocols. A Machine Learning strategy will be employed to highlight the relationships between the physical and chemical properties of these materials before treatment and the conditions of the cleaning procedure,with the ultimate aim of providing a user-friendly computational tool for determining the optimal treatment conditions and expected outcome. At the end of the three-year project, PlasCO2 will provide novel solutions and protocols for the cleaning of 20th and 21st century cultural heritage, using an environmentally friendly approach.
What is more, the already manifested interest from museums and heritage collections will allow PlasCO2 to help rescue a number of objects unfit to display or at risk, enabling a better access to this important legacy.