Analytical chemistry in the field of cultural heritage

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Abstract

This review covers the analytical developments, instrumentation and methodologies applied to the characterisation of cultural heritage materials published up until 2014.

Abstract

This review covers past and present developments of analytical chemistry in the field of Cultural Heritage (CH), from the methods of characterization of materials to the procedures aiming at diagnosing the state of conservation of CH assets. A large number of analytical methodologies and tools (molecular and elemental spectroscopic techniques, chemometrics, chemical reactivity and modeling, etc.) are now available to define: (a) the impacts of environmental stressors (natural and anthropogenic), (b) the decaying (chemical reactions) pathways of such materials in the surrounding environment, (c) the development of new remediation (cleaning, consolidation, rehabilitation, etc.) processes based on the chemical knowledge and (d) the transfer of such knowledge to conservation departments in museums and companies working in the field of CH. Two important issues are highlighted in this review. One is the important role of analytical chemistry in this field, although its role was forgotten until a few decades ago; nowadays there are hundreds of papers demonstrating the important role of analytical chemistry practitioners in many kinds of CH actions. The other is the societal impact of the issues related to the study of heritage ( i.e., rock art paintings, Pompeii, paintings in medieval churches, famous artists, etc.) where analytical chemists are key professionals especially if portable instruments are used in field work. Finally a special consideration will be paid to future developments and how analytical chemistry can give added value to the research in CH.

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Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), part II: review of instrumental and methodological approaches to material analysis and applications to different fields.

David W Hahn, Nicoló Omenetto (2012)

The first part of this two-part review focused on the fundamental and diagnostics aspects of laser-induced plasmas, only touching briefly upon concepts such as sensitivity and detection limits and largely omitting any discussion of the vast panorama of the practical applications of the technique. Clearly a true LIBS community has emerged, which promises to quicken the pace of LIBS developments, applications, and implementations. With this second part, a more applied flavor is taken, and its intended goal is summarizing the current state-of-the-art of analytical LIBS, providing a contemporary snapshot of LIBS applications, and highlighting new directions in laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, such as novel approaches, instrumental developments, and advanced use of chemometric tools. More specifically, we discuss instrumental and analytical approaches (e.g., double- and multi-pulse LIBS to improve the sensitivity), calibration-free approaches, hyphenated approaches in which techniques such as Raman and fluorescence are coupled with LIBS to increase sensitivity and information power, resonantly enhanced LIBS approaches, signal processing and optimization (e.g., signal-to-noise analysis), and finally applications. An attempt is made to provide an updated view of the role played by LIBS in the various fields, with emphasis on applications considered to be unique. We finally try to assess where LIBS is going as an analytical field, where in our opinion it should go, and what should still be done for consolidating the technique as a mature method of chemical analysis. © 2012 Society for Applied Spectroscopy