Prognosis of Structural and Materials Health in Heritage Conservation

Immovable 3D cultural heritage objects are an important part of the history and culture in Europe and provide a tangible connection with the past for current societies. These objects comprise religious buildings, castles and fortified buildings, palaces and historic houses, as well as engineering structures such as bridges and waterways. In many cases the buildings contain historic objects, including paintings, furniture, household items, as well as personal items such as jewellery and clothes. The structure of these buildings must be maintained to preserve both the building itself but also its contents. Cultural heritage objects are exposed to weather, changing climate, deterioration of materials, e.g. corrosion, moisture ingress, biological attack, pollution, wear and tear by use and sometimes vandalism. One of the challenges for heritage conservation is to combine the current detailed knowledge with an holistic approach to assessing the overall condition of the object. These parameters are necessarily subjective and comprise deterioration that causes a visual impact on the object, loss of function or loss of authenticity. This requires an interdisciplinary approach comprising the expertise of conservators, scientists, engineers and working in combination with stakeholders such as owners of heritage objects, local authorities and the public. This paper proposes the use of spatial referencing of chemical, biological and structural damage functions to enhance the prognosis capability in heritage science. The current situation is that these individual damage functions are either assessed separately or combined in an ad hoc way. The paper contains an example of immovable cultural heritage at risk in Europe, scientific approaches for the measurement and prognosis of chemical, biological, climate-related and structural damage, together with analysis tools to identify spatial regions with multiple degradation process indicators present.