Advancement and Prospect of Bionic Techniques in the Conservation of the Cultural Heritage

Abstract

The ancient wall paintings and earthen architecture ruins are the most important part of cultural heritage. Inhabitation and locomotion of animals are major factors that lead to biodegradation and biodeterioration at the cultural heritage sites. In this miniview, based on our team work of cultural relics conservation in recent years, the latest findings domestic and overseas in fields of ethology and bionics were summarized, focusing on the correlated methods and techniques that can be used into cross-over study of cultural relics conservation. Animal's biting, nesting, cocooning, crawling, and scratching are all behavioral process that easily bring damage to cultural heritage, such as ancient murals, architectures, earth ruins and so on. Both modern video record techniques and animal motion trajectory analysis may be taken use to improve the analytic accuracy of gait information for animals that crawling on the surface of cultural relics, which promoted the related study of motor pattern, behavior process, and damage pattern of animals to cultural relics. The three dimensional tiny force sensor with high resolution can be used for measuring normal adhesive force and tangential friction force of animals that contacted the surface of fragile cultural relics, which make animal adhesion modeling and historical relics mechanical model constructing possible, and provide newly evidence for biomechanics process illumination of animals locomotion. Totally, the application of the bionic techniques to the study of animals behavioral characteristics will provide new opportunity to better clarify the biological damaging mechanisms of cultural relics and control animal bioderioration, which will drive the development of cultural relics conservation technology in the near future.