The scientists from the JU faculty of chemistry carry out conservation and restoration of silk standards that belong to the Wawel Castle collection  and are endangered by microbes, dampness and light.

The Wawel Royal Castle collection includes, inter alia, the Turkish standards captured by Polish king John III Sobieski during the Battle of Vienna and the banner of king Charles X Gustav of Sweden captured at Rudnik. Some of the 83 banners, many of which witnessed the most important events from the Polish history, are on display in the Crown Treasury. Others are not available to visitors since, although silk is a durable material, it is vulnerable to many  environmental factors, the most dangerous of which are: dampness, light, microorganisms, and air pollution.   

The research on the standards is conducted by the scientists from the Heterogeneous Reactions Kinetics Group of the JU Faculty of Chemistry, including the doctoral student Monika Koperska, the winner of the first Polish edition of FameLab competition, who has also won the audience vote prize and one of two runner up prizes from the panel of judges at the International Grand Final of the competition in Cheltenham, UK.

In their experiments, the researchers try to determine how long a material can last, by exposing it to large portions of thermal energy and light. In that way they can, to a certain extent, simulate the changes that affect the fabric in the long term.

According to Monika Koperska, it is very difficult to determine how long will it take for the changes that happen in laboratory to occur in nature. "You have to precisely know the speed of disintegration of a given material to tell how long it will take the fabric to reach the level of disintegration that was achieved in the laboratory. What makes things even more complicated is the fact that the conditions under which the items were kept is often unknown to us, so we don't know which factors and to what extent could have contributed to their disintegration." What is more, silk is a long and complicated protein. "It is difficult to estimate the speed of disintegration of the material if we do not know the reactions that take place in it under museum conditions," she added.  

Ms. Koperska calls herself a spectroscopist. She explains that: "Spectroscopy is an interaction between light and matter. It is, however, not only the visible light that we are interested in … but the whole spectrum of long and short waves. They are all electromagnetic waves which interact with matter if they meet it on their way" Further she adds that this mutual interaction decreases the energy carried by the wave and causes changes in the material. This mutual interaction can be captured and analyzed.

Based on: naukawpolsce.pap.pl