Evaluation of Commercial Consolidant Products Commonly Used for the Conservation of Wooden Artifacts ^†

Wood represents one of the most encountered materials in Romanian traditional buildings. Exposed to a wide variety of factors (including organic and inorganic pollutants, climatic factors or exposure to microbial colonization), the wood can lose not only its aesthetic characteristics but also its functional and mechanical properties [1].

The present work evaluates three of the most encountered antimicrobial consolidants currently applied on cultural heritage artifacts, by studying their influence on the properties of selected wood models.

The wooden models used for the experiments consisted of birch wood spatulas with standard dimensions (150 × 18 × 1.6 mm), to which the consolidants were applied by immersion. Microscopical aspects of the treated samples were collected using an OPTIKA B-150DBR optical microscope, while the mechanical properties were evaluated using a DMA Q800 (TA Instruments, New Castle, DE, USA), which has a force resolution of 0.00001 N and a strain resolution of 1 nm, operating in multi-frequency–strain mode, samples heated up to 285 °C with a heating rate of 3 °C/min, in air. The results obtained suggest the influence of the different consolidants on the properties of the wooden materials.

The study of the consolidants’ influence on the mechanical properties allows the proposal of appropriate consolidants for the selected materials (Figure 1).