No abstract

Animal glues are widely used in restoration as adhesives, binders, and consolidants for organic and inorganic materials. Their variable performances are intrinsically linked to the adhesive properties of collagen, which determine the chemical, physical, and mechanical properties of the glue. We have molecularly characterized the protein components of a range of homemade and commercial glues using mass spectrometry techniques. A shotgun proteomic analysis provided animal origin, even when blended, and allowed us to distinguish between hide and bone glue on the basis of the presence of collagen type III, which is abundant in connective skin/leather tissues and poorly synthetized in bones. Furthermore, chemical modifications, a consequence of the preparation protocols from the original animal tissue, were thoroughly evaluated. Deamidation, methionine oxidation, and backbone cleavage have been analyzed as major collagen modifications, demonstrating their variability among different glues and showing that, on average, bone glues are less deamidated than hide glues, but more fragmented, and mixed-collagen glues are overall less deamidated than pure glues. We believe that these data may be of general analytical interest in the characterization of collagen-based materials and may help restorers in the selection of the most appropriate materials to be used in conservation treatments.

No abstract

We report on a method for recovering data from a simple portable Digital Speckle Pattern Interferometer, we used for monitoring structural behavior of a painting on wood, hanging on a wall, outside of laboratory conditions, without anti-vibration devices. In such a situation, fringes produced by the object displacements were affected by unpredictable distortions caused by environment vibrations. However, an sufficient number of suitable, i.e., undistorted or barely distorted, fringe patterns usable for processing was found. We performed multiple acquisitions at a frame rate as high as possible. The main task was picking out usable interferograms from large amount of frames. We developed a PC-based method based on jointly analysis of spectral content and fringe image sharpness as selection rules. The selected frames were utilized for off-line processing by using an approach based on Hilbert Transform and Phase Unwrapping via MAx-flow (PUMA) algorithm. We obtained a collection of displacement-maps, that allowed for evaluating the whole structure deformations, caused by environmental thermo-hygrometric fluctuations.

No abstract