Suitability of Some Existing Damage Indexes for Assessing Agreements in Maintenance and Management of Museum Climatization Systems

Abstract

Heating, Ventilating and Air-Conditioning systems in museums are called to properly control important microclimate parameters, not only for visitors' wellbeing, but mostly for the preservation of works of art. Accordingly, in case of interruptions to Heating, Ventilating and Air-Conditioning systems, due to maintenance interventions or drawbacks, it is essential to guarantee the acceptable break from service to which possible damages for the works of art are related. In this regard, the aim of this work is to introduce a simple indicator to support curators in regulating the stipulation of contracts with external companies, a more effective management and maintenance of the Heating, Ventilating and Air-Conditioning systems will thus be achieved in order to preserve the works of art, by integrating into the contracts economic penalties related to the system's service break period. The feasibility of this new procedure has been checked by means of a case study involving the "Museo Regionale" of Palermo (Italy).

Indoor Parameters of Museum Buildings for Guaranteeing Artworks Preservation and People’s Comfort: Compatibilities, Constraints, and Suggestions

“…For a better understanding of what has been described and discussed earlier, in this subsection it was decided to report an application example by referring to a real case, namely, the Sicilian Regional Museum sited in Palermo (Italy), where many artifacts of the highest quality can be found displayed mainly within shared rooms. The museum itself (which has been the subject of previous studies by the present authors [12,60,73]) represents an element of the cultural heritage since it is hosted by the historical Palazzo Abatellis, a splendid example of Gothic-Catalan architecture built in 1495 by Matteo Carnilivari (Figure 4).…”

“…In this regard, to take into account both the thermo-hygrometric characteristics per se and their effect on the possible causes and/or substances that can damage artworks, it would be more appropriate to use some of the general metrics that have been introduced in the last few years. Indeed, in the literature, there are various works regarding indicators of the quality of environmental conditions for the conservation of artworks, such as IPI preservation metrics [71], NICHE [72], IMQ [20], EMC [12,21,73], and so on, whose aim is to use a unique value for evaluating the environmental conditions for conservation of a specific artwork or a group of specific artworks. Accordingly, as previously reported in Section 3.1, a better assessment of indoor thermal performance for the comfort of people should be based on the PMV and PPD thermal comfort indexes [40] rather than on fixed values of temperature and humidity.…”