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.