Egypt has a lot of ancient monasteries and churches, which were decorated with different kinds of wall paintings. Structure of these wall paintings consists of support, plaster and painting layers. Paintings deterioration is primarily due to physicochemical, natural and human factors. The most detrimental factors are bat patches, old varnish and organic waste of birds. All these lead to the gradual disappearance of paintings. Modern technology of conservation is focused on application of new materials for cleaning of wall paintings. Here we report on the use of enzymes, for cleaning surface of coptic wall paintings. Analytical techniques such as particle induced X-ray emission, Fourier transform infrared and optical microscopy were used to evaluate the enzymatic cleaning processes of coptic wall paintings and to identify the chemical composition of red, yellow and white pigments. Particle induced X-ray emission results indicated that there is no change in the chemical composition of the materials and pigments due to enzymatic cleaning. Fourier transform infrared and optical microscopy results confirmed the stability of organic medium before and after treatment of different kind of patches.
In our present work, we applied ex-situ casting procedure to prepare a nanocomposite (NCP) from Makrofol polycarbonate (PC) and CdSe nanoparticles. The CdSe nanoparticles were prepared by thermolysis procedure in the presence of N2 gas flow. Rietveld refinement of x-ray data illustrated that the CdSe accustoms cubic zinc blend structure of a 6.057 Å lattice parameter and 2 nm typical grain size. Samples from the prepared NCP were exposed to γ dosages (20-250 kGy). The modifications induced in the NCP films owing to γ dosages have been studied. The γ irradiation (50-250 kGy) causes the crosslinks that reduces the optical bandgap from 4.15 to 3.81 eV; associated with an increase in dielectric parameters and refractive index. This is attributed to the increase of the mass fraction of the disordered regions as specified by XRD. The PC-CdSe NCP was found to have reaction to color modification which makes it suitable in saleable reproduction on printing press.
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