Pulsed laser cleaning of metallic heritage

The main goal of this study is to design and optimize a low-invasive laser cleaning treatment for metallic cultural heritage artefacts. The treatment should remove the dangerous corrosion products without affecting the original surface of the artefacts. The pulsed laser cleaning process is performed, in this preliminary step, with a near-IR Q-switched Yb:YAG fibre laser on artificially patinated Cu-based reference samples. A morphological and microstructural investigation has been carried out on the specimens submitted to the cleaning process in order to evaluate the effects of the different laser parameters. The optimized laser cleaning procedure will be validated, in a second step, on real ancient metallic artefacts.