"Piero Baglioni, a chemist at the University of Florence, Italy, and colleagues have described a new technology - "nanomagnetc sponges" - to clean works of art. Their works is described in a recently published article in ACS' Langmuir journal.
This new technology Baglioni mixed nanoparticles, made of cobalt and iron oxide, into a polymer gel to create a magnetic sponge with cavities just 50 nanometres in size. They filled these cavities with microemulsions - mixtures including surfactant molecules that work in a similar manner to those in soap - that help to dissolve dirt on contact.
The cleaning technique itself is simple: the researchers coat an area with a few millimetres of gel and leave it for between 10 minutes and an hour, depending on how dirty the artwork is, before removing the film with an ordinary bar magnet (see image, top right). The gel can then be dried and reused.
This new technology Baglioni mixed nanoparticles, made of cobalt and iron oxide, into a polymer gel to create a magnetic sponge with cavities just 50 nanometres in size. They filled these cavities with microemulsions - mixtures including surfactant molecules that work in a similar manner to those in soap - that help to dissolve dirt on contact.
The cleaning technique itself is simple: the researchers coat an area with a few millimetres of gel and leave it for between 10 minutes and an hour, depending on how dirty the artwork is, before removing the film with an ordinary bar magnet (see image, top right). The gel can then be dried and reused.
Disponível aqui http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/la701292d
