The present study focused on the characteristics of lime-tile dust mortars with sticky rice addition, which were prepared according to historic Chinese accounts. Results showed that addition of sticky rice into mortars could improve water retention capacity, prolong setting time, and reduce bulk density values. Sticky rice addition also had long-term detrimental impacts on mortar strength development, concurrently increasing their water absorption values. FTIR, XRD and TG-DSC analyses revealed that the addition of sticky rice into mortars could slow down the carbonation as well as hydration process, at the same time forming both calcite and aragonite as carbonation products.
This paper presents the design and field tests of an intelligent robotic system for archaeological exploration. The system is designed for recording the internal environment of the underground ancient tombs. The recorded data is used for the preservation of antiques inside the ancient tombs as well as for providing the valuable references to the archaeological research. The whole system is modular and minimized in size that can be adapted for two different archaeological situations during the exploration of the ancient tombs. The robotic system can enter the covered ancient tombs through the digging holes prepared by the regular archaeological exploration. One size of the vertical digging hole is less than 12 centimeter in diameter, and the other is 50 centimeter in diameter. The archaeologists can operate on the remote station to control the robotic system with wired communication. The field test results are finally presented for validation of this archaeological robotic system design.
The restoration of paintings always involves the removal of darkened superficial layers, which are mainly due to dust deposition and aged varnishes. As cleaning is an irreversible and invasive treatment, physical methods (i.e., laser cleaning) instead of chemical ones are frequently suggested to reduce side effects on pictorial layers. Among the most employed laser systems, the free-running Er:YAG laser is considered very suitable for fine arts cleaning. This laser works at 2.94 μm, at which only –OH and –NH bonds in molecules are excited. This character can become a disadvantage when pigments with these functional groups are present. To understand the potential of the Er:YAG laser in such situations or in the presence of degradable pigments, the effectiveness of varnish removal from paintings prepared with egg yolk as the binder and cinnabar and lead white as the pigments were systematically investigated. Different cleaning conditions were used, and a hyperspectral sensor was innovatively used as a rapid, in situ and non-destructive technique to assess the effects of laser ablation, besides microscopic analysis. Though results obtained show all these pigments are sensitive to this laser radiation, satisfactory cleaning can be achieved without damaging the pictorial layer. The best cleaning conditions were 0.5 W of power (50 mJ and 10 Hz for energy and frequency), with 2-propanol as the wetting agent.
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