TeACH Project

The TeACH project (2008–11) was an EU 7th Framework project that looked at technology and tools for the assessment of air pollution impact on cultural heritage.

About

Deterioration of heritage materials is a cumulative process which is affected by environmental (climatic and pollution) conditions. As materials are exposed to the natural environment, they undergo discolouration, crack formation, and brittleness, as a result of a range of chemical and physical processes.

TEACH addressed the issue of pollutants responsible for weathering of cultural heritage by looking at the future – typical pollutants in urban areas across Europe are ever changing.

Aims

TeACH's key aims were to:

• identify pollutants that may play the most important role in the future
• develop a simple, economical, compact kit comprised of existing and new devices for monitoring the weathering of cultural heritage
• produce a new tool to correlate the changing damage patterns outdoors with the likely damage to cultural materials indoors.

Outputs

Gianluca Pastorelli, developed an experimental set-up to look at how pollutants affect paper in dependence of material properties of the paper.

The information was summed up in the form of comprehensive damage functions, which provided the information on synergistic effects of pollutants and environmental parameters on material decay.

This approach has now enabled us to prioritise actions to be taken in terms of indoor pollution mitigation in collections. 

Impact

The TeACH project contributed to developing a European wide accepted list of guidelines, which includes methods for evaluation, monitoring and mitigation of the effects of pollutants on cultural heritage.

In June 2011 TeACH held a workshop on 'Monitoring pollution damage to cultural heritage'.

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People

Dr Gianluca Pastorelli
Researcher
UCL

Dr Matija Strlic
Principal Investigator
UCL

Project partners

• CNR-ISAC, Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Italy
• ICIE - Cooperative Institute for Innovation, Italy
• TECNO PENTA, Italy
• LABEIN-TECNALIA, Spain
• ACCIONA, Spain
• University of Antwerp, Department of Chemistry, Belgium
• NILU - Norwegian Institute for Air Research, Norway
• UCL - Centre for Sustainable Heritage, University College London
• HDK - Cologne Cathedral - Dombauverwaltung Köln, Germany
• MNK - Crakow National Museum, Poland

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Image credit

Unsplash: Khachik Simonian

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