Abstract
Salt inhibitors have been receiving increasing attention as potential innovative systems to counteract salt damage by preventing crystallisation of the salts within the natural stone structure—and related disruptive action—of built heritage. Especially, we focus on biomass-derived inhibitor systems featuring complete solubility in water or alcohol and intrinsic non-toxicity. Moving from the promising results obtained, the present study aims to develop research concerning the possibility of rationalizing the collected data sets and making them amenable to statistical analysis. This paper reports on an exploratory application of one of the most powerful methods in chemometrics, i.e., principal component analysis (PCA), in this area. It will be seen that this method is a promising tool to extract information from a series of tests to optimize them and to reduce the level of “noise” present in the data collected, i.e., unnecessary information or experimental errors, and to suggest new directions.
Highlights
Multidisciplinary research to address major challenges related to the conservation of the Built Heritage is gaining ever growing importance
In particular, is a harmful and complex widespread process. It is generally understood as a temperature/humidity dependent weathering process arising from: (1) the presence of salt crystals on the surface of porous materials, which generally results in an aesthetic rather than mechanical damage, or (2) mechanical stresses introduced by salt crystals deposited within the material pores, which may undermine the structural safety of the materials as well as cause widespread loss of surface
The basic idea of principal component analysis (PCA) [29] is to extract the maximum information from the collected data, removing the unnecessary; the data set is transformed in a N × P matrix, where N is the number of objects, i and P the number of variables, k
Summary
Classical desalination techniques usually involve washing with water and application of poulticing using highly absorbent materials; other approaches include chemical cleaning, salt extraction by barium compounds, electromigration, the creation of chemical barriers, and the employment of a variety of consolidants and surface coatings, such as water repellents. Using highly absorbent materials; other approaches include chemical cleaning, salt extraction by barium compounds, electromigration, the creation of chemical barriers, and the employment of a variety of consolidants and surface coatings, such as water repellents. Despite their potential, to date there are only a handful of studies in the literature [26,27,28] which employ chemometric tools in Cultural Heritage science to obtain a comparative basis for a set of results, and none of them deals the subject of salt weathering. An optimization of tests to extract as much information as possible is recommended in the field of Cultural Heritage, where the scientist is an essential element for describing materials, environment, and their interactions
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