From microfibres to nanogels-conservation cleaning of plastics heritage
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Surveys of the condition of plastics heritage in Europe indicate that 70- 75% of collections require cleaning. Oily fingerprints, carbonaceous dirt and crystalline degradation products on plastic objects and artworks reduce their significances, chemical and physical stabilities. However, it is essential to balance the need to clean against the risks of mechanical damage from cleaning tools particularly scratches and of inducing chemical changes from aqueous- or solvent-based agents by mobilizing additives and solubilizing degraded polymers. Conservators must therefore consider scientific, aesthetic and ethical factors before developing a cleaning strategy for plastic objects and artworks.<br/>Until around 2000, research into cleaning of plastics heritage used visual examination alone as an evaluation tool and concluded that dry mechanical cleaning was the most effective treatment offering the lowest risk of damage. In 2012, the EU 7th Framework Programme project POPART used optical- and scanning electron microscopy, changes in surface energy and gloss to conduct an exhaustive evaluation of mechanical, aqueous and non-aqueous cleaning techniques for their effectiveness at removing sebum and carbonaceous soils from cellulose acetate, polyethylene, PVC, polystyrene and polymethylmethacrylate. POPART concluded that applying anionic and nonionic detergent solutions with polyester microfiber cloth, cleaned more effectively and produced fewer scratches than using dry cleaning tools. Polyethylene and PS were the plastics found most vulnerable to scratching. In 2018, the Horizon 2020 research project NANORESTART added nanogels and -gums to the cleaning tools examined in POPART and infrared spectroscopy to the suite of instruments. The project concluded that nanogels based on polyvinyl alcohol, loaded with anionic detergent solutions and applied to plastic surfaces for between 5 and 20 minutes, were equally effective as microfiber cloths at removing sebum and carbonaceous soils but produced significantly fewer scratches. It is clear that twenty years of conservation research has dramatically increased the range of cleaning tools and cleaning agents available. In addition to the latest findings, this paper will use case histories to discuss how developments in conservation cleaning science influence cleaning practice for plastics heritage.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".