Student Sarah Hunt blogs on acetic acid sensors for museum display cases

Tasty on fish & chips but a problem for museums… SEAHA student Sarah Hunt recently blogged about her work in heritage science detecting acetic acid in The Book and Paper Gathering. Acetic acid is known to be damaging to museum artefacts and is particularly problematic within display cases. As damage occurs below the odour threshold, Sarah blogs about her development of piezoelectric quartz (PQC) crystal sensors to quantify parts per billion concentrations of acetic acid inside display cases.

Sarah also discusses how her work has wide application to museums and heritage objects; PQCs are sensitive to nanogram changes of mass and are also small, affordable, and have fast response times.

Links

• Read Sarah Hunt, Developing acetic acid sensor for museum display cases, in The Book and Paper Gathering
• Sarah Hunt student profile

Image:  Battery-operated prototype sensor board for the PQC acetic acid sensors. It has the capability to remotely log data from eight sensors, by Sarah Hunt