New mineralogical techniques contribute to prevent national herit...( This release is available in Centr...)

This release is available in Spanish.

Humidity, environmental pollution, cleaning with aggressive products for the chemical composition of the rock, etc give rise to the appearance of salts which cause stone decomposition, paint coats detachment, dust accumulation, etc.

The treatments used up to now to deal with the problem have been directed, almost exclusively, to preserve the beauty of the affected monument, assuming, with an almost fatalist attitude, that the damage will go on as an effect of passing of time. European experts joint in the SALTCONTROL project have collaborated in a new work line to deal with the problem: Blocking inside the stone the mineral salt crystallization process that ends up destroying it.

One of the works carried out in the framework of SALTCONTROL is the doctoral thesis Prevencin del dao debido a cristalizacin de sales en el patrimonio histrico construido mediante el uso de inhibidores de cristalizacin (Damage prevention due to salt crystallization in national heritage through the use of crystallization inhibitors), read by Encarnacin Mara Ruiz Agudo, under the supervision of Prof Carlos Manuel Rodrguez Navarro; as well as several papers published by scientific journals such as Journal of Physical Chemistry, Environmental Geology, Scanning y Journal of the Japanese Association for Crystal Growth.

According to Ruiz Agudo ( Centro Andaluz del Medio Ambiente Department of Mineralogy and Petrology of the University of Granada) ornamental porous materials damage due to salt attack is one of the most aggressive alteration mechanisms that affect constructed heritage. In the last decades, we have developed different methods to prevent or reduce the damage due to salt crystallization in ornamen
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