On Friday 17th November, our researcher Iago Pozo participed in the @athena.europe talks with his talk Lasers cleaning Cultural Heritage. The talk was recorded and you can watch it in the YouTube channel of ATHENA European university.
Abstract: Tangible cultural heritage is constantly threatened by different factors, both natural and anthropogenic, such as climate change, vandalism, polluting gases, etc., which can lead to the appearance of deposits, patinas or crusts on surfaces. To combat this deterioration, different cleaning techniques have been developed and have been improved and expanded over the last decades. The use of tools based on laser technology has been one of the latest to be incorporated.
The laser cleaning technique is based on the ablation process in which surface layers of a substrate are removed when they are irradiated with a laser beam. In this talk we will present the influence of the laser parameters such as the active medium, wavelength, pulse duration, etc. and the characteristics of the materials, both the one to be removed and the supporting one, on the cleaning efficiency achieved.