Abstract
If left to dry uncontrollably following excavation, marine archaeological wood suffers significant and irreparable damage. Conservation treatments are required to consolidate degraded wood and to remove residual water. Drying must be controlled to eliminate erratic and heterogeneous water removal. Monitoring and understanding the drying process progression is invaluable information to garner real-time knowledge to correlate with chemical and physical material properties, and to develop future conservation strategies. Here, polyethylene glycol (PEG) consolidated marine archaeological wood was periodically sampled during drying to determine the moisture content as a function of location, time, and sample depth. The heterogeneous nature of the material leads to significant noise across spatial and temporal measurements, making it challenging to elucidate meaningful conclusions from visual observation of the raw data. Therefore, the spatiotemporal data was computationally analysed to produce a representative model of the ship’s drying, illustrated by a dynamic simulation. From this we can quantitatively predict the drying rate, determine the depth-dependence of drying, and estimate the resulting equilibrium moisture content. This is the first time such simulations have been carried out on this material and conservation process, demonstrating the power of applying numerical modelling to further our understanding of complex heritage data.
Highlights
Prior to excavation, marine archaeological wood can experience chemical decay, cellulose hydrolysis and bacterial cellulose consumption [1]
0 years indicates thethe starting point moisture content modelAcross to the observational data collected from starboard antiof the drying process
This study presents moisture content data collected from a wide range of locations on the Mary Rose over three years of its controlled drying, and a computational model, built from those data, to describe the drying of consolidated marine archaeological wood generally
Summary
Marine archaeological wood can experience chemical decay, cellulose hydrolysis and bacterial cellulose consumption [1]. The wood’s capillaries and microcapillaries, both naturally occurring and due to degradation, are saturated with water [2,3,4]. If left to dry uncontrollably without prior consolidation to compensate for lost wood components, it will likely suffer from extensive dimensional changes that can cause severe structural collapse and irreparable damage [3]. Marine archaeological wood often requires a carefully designed, and often bespoke, conservation treatment. Of particular concern are wooden shipwrecks, which due to their size and the interconnectivity and reliance of one timber on another for structural integrity, require a considered approach to their conservation.
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