Cultural Heritage Conservation and Environmental Impact Assessment by Non-Destructive Testing and Micro-Analysis

This book mostly contains contributions by the invited lecturers at the 7th International Conference on Non-Destructive Testing and Micro-Analysis for the Diagnostics and Conservation of the Cultural and Environmental Heritage. The contributors have all been chosen for their individual reputations and the quality of their research, but also because they represent a field deemed highly important. Hence, this book give balanced coverage of the areas that are most relevant in non-destructive testing and micro-analysis in the realm of cultural heritage.

The analysis methods provide the clinical composition of cultural artifacts to elucidate their provenance, the rate of alteration as a result of exposure to the environment and the effectiveness of conservation and restoration strategies. The techniques are partially or fully non-destructive, are portable, or allow study of different parts of a heterogeneous work of art.

Rene Van Grieken obtained his PhD degree in Chemistry from the University of Ghent, Belgium, in 1971. He became Professor of Analytical and Environmental Chemistry at the University of Antwerp in 1974, and was nominated Full Professor in 1984. In 1980, he was a co-founder, and has since then been a co-director, of MiTAC, the Micro- and Trace Analysis Centre of the University of Antwerp, which employs some 80 researchers in fundamental analytical chemistry and its environmental, material science and cultural heritage applications. He has published some 650 articles and a dozen books in these various fields.

Koen Janssens studied chemistry at the University of Antwerp and obtained a PhD in Analytical Chemistry in 1989 from this institution. In 1990, he became a staff member of MiTAC, first as a research associate and later as research director of the National Fund for Scientific Research, Brussels, Belgium. Since October 2000, he is Professor of Analytical Chemistry at the University of Antwerp, with teaching duties in radiochemistry and instrumental analytical chemistry. His research interests are centered on the use of X-ray microbeams for non-destructive microanalysis of various natures.