Experimental Investigation on an Evaporative Cooling System for the Environmental Control in Archaeology Museum

Abstract

High energy consumption of the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) system and unsuitable preservation environment for earthen relics are common problems to the environmental control in archaeology museums, which are the main reasons that many archaeology museums in China do not equip HVAC system and are suffering deteriorations of dry cracking and salt enrichment. In this paper, an environmental control system, which employs evaporative cooling and ultrasonic humidification units to control the local environment for the relics preservation area and provide a “supersaturated” humidity (RH) for suppressing earthen cracking, is proposed. An experimental system was built to validate the feasibility of the control strategy. Experimental tests of the system were performed and the results show that the system could create a relative stable preservation for the relics, and the RH of the preservation area is high enough to replenish water to the earthen relics. It provides a high-efficiency and energy-saving environmental control strategy for historic site in archaeology museum.