Air curtain as a barrier against pollutants in cultural heritage: a case study

Abstract

Every year millions of people visit the works of art placed in museums, which aren't the safest place to protect cultural heritages from air pollutants.The use of air curtains may often represent a protection for the cultural heritage without operating on the material of the objects, and without limiting the perception of the work of art. The aim of this work consists of the characterisation of this device, which is widely used in industry, but not yet frequently adopted in the field of conservation of works of art. As a matter of fact, the employment of air curtains to segregate pollutant diffusion near the sources of fire prevention is actually more and more diffused in industry buildings. Their success is due to the peculiarity to separate zones without fixed barriers which would interfere with people and equipment. The application of air flows in museums deals with the problem of separating visitors and objects in order to protect the latter from pollutants.When a decontamination treatment of the visitors is provided, by means of an air curtain system that is able to remove most of the potentially dangerous pollutants from people as they enter, an "indirect protection method" is defined. An ongoing research of the latter is presently studied in the Museum of the Rocca di Vignola (Modena) to remove pollutants from visitors of the fresco painted chapel.In the present paper some CFD simulations performed with FLUENT are compared with the experimental measures realized after the first utilization of the air curtain outside the fresco chapel of "Uguccione Contrari" in Vignola.As a preliminary result it is possible to underline the good accordance between simulation and experimental results so that it is possible to be confident in using CFD simulation code as a design tool for dynamic barriers against pollutants in cultural heritage.

Experimental Study on the Aerodynamic Sealing of Air Curtains

“…Santoli, Cumo, and Mariotti [23] presented a numerical and experimental study on a cultural heritage building, using an air jet with speeds between 4 and 5 m/s, to create a physical barrier to the flow. They concluded that the ventilation system has efficiencies of 70-75%.…”

“…There are several applications of this concept that aim to avoid contaminant spreading, such as: an operating room [7,[14][15][16][17][18][19], a tobacco smoke control [20,21], the protection of art works in museums and of cultural heritage [22,23], and open refrigerated display cabinets [24,25]. Several studies about air curtain efficiency have been conducted on these applications.…”

Full-size experimental assessment of the aerodynamic sealing of air curtains for particulate matter

“…However, it was not developed to assess either the jet or the exhaust parameters that are to be fulfilled to keep the jet in the transition between the optimum condition and the ‘inflow breakthrough condition’. Santoli, Cumo, and Mariotti 27 presented a numerical and experimental study and concluded that the ventilation system has efficiencies of 70–75%. However, the parameters that allow maximizing the efficiency of the air curtain were not analysed.…”

“…The study of the use of air curtains to avoid contaminant spreading has been reported, for tobacco smoke control, 17,18 for operating rooms, 7,[19][20][21][22][23][24] in offices, 25 for protection of art works in museums and of cultural heritage, 26,27 in personalized air curtains, 28 in open refrigerated display cabinets [29][30][31] and in public transportation. 32 The studies on the performance of air curtains have been based on CFD models, 25,27,28,31,[33][34][35][36] on semi-analytical models, 16,37 and on experiments. 3,15,[38][39][40][41][42][43] Qi et al 33 presented a parametric study about air curtain performance.…”

Full-Size Experimental Assessment of the Aerodynamic Sealing of Low Velocity Air Curtains

“…Air curtains have been used with several objectives, such as Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) [1][2][3], smoke control in passageways [4,5] and airborne pollutant and biological control [6][7][8]. Regarding the need to avoid the contaminant spreading, several developments and applications have been reported, namely, in operating rooms [7,[9][10][11][12][13][14], for tobacco smoke control [15,16], for protection of art works in museums and of cultural heritage [17,18], in open refrigerated display cabinets [19][20][21], in offices [22], in personalized air curtains [23] and in public transportation [24]. These studies show that air curtains have the potential to reduce the pollutants transferred from one compartment to another.…”