Monitoring of the Environmental Corrosivity in Museums by RFID Sensors: Application to Pollution Emitted by Archeological Woods

Abstract

The control of air quality in museums or storages is of fundamental interest for the conservation of historic artifacts. The present work reports an example of application of RFID sensors developed in the European project SensMat and dedicated to this issue. The sensors are based on the variation of property of an RFID tag coupled with a sensitive silver thin film exposed to the environment. As it will be described in the paper, such low-cost sensors are interrogated by a commercial reader and provide the environmental corrosivity index and thus the presence of pollutants. The selected case study concerns the monitoring of pollution by H2S in a building dedicated to conservation and restoration of archeological and historical woods. The ability of sensors to map spatially the corrosivity within buildings is highlighted.

Low-Cost Technologies Used in Corrosion Monitoring

“…It is important to mention that in the aforementioned studies, real-time corrosion monitoring and corrosion rate calculation were not performed. However, Zhang et al [ 124 ], Zarifi et al [ 125 ], Deif et al [ 126 ], and Rioual et al [ 127 ] developed RFID-based low-cost corrosion monitoring systems with real-time update ability.…”

Development of low-cost RFID sensors dedicated to air pollution monitoring for preventive conservation

“…Its dimensions are 11.3 × 6.5 cm 2 . The principle of the sensor was described in detail elsewhere [26,27]. As shown, it is based on the electromagnetic coupling between a metallic sensitive thin film which acts as a coupon exposed to a corrosive environment and the antenna of an RFID tag.…”

“…A calibration procedure was performed in Ref. [27] to correlate the variation of RSSI measured by the RFID reader and the decrease of thickness of silver thin films. It was shown that by keeping a RSSI value of −45 dBm for the reference tag, the sensitive one is responding with a RSSI value of −55 dBm when a thickness of 7.5 nm of silver remains.…”

“…A recent progress concerns the integration of sensing devices within this technology. Some RFID sensors were proposed for corrosion monitoring [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. For this purpose, several RFID architectures were selected with their advantages and drawbacks.…”

“…However, this technology suffers from the absence of any commercial reader and thus a low TRL (Technology Readiness Level). Within the European project SensMat, an Ultra High Frequency (UHF) RFID corrosion sensor was developed to assess the air quality and IC classes in museums [26,27]. The chosen architecture was then the UHF-RFID one since it employs commercially available readers which can also be used in museums for identification tasks.…”