The effect of changes in air humidity on historic tapestries

Historic tapestries are textile artworks usually found hanging inside historic buildings. They form part of the European heritage and have been exposed for centuries to diverse environmental conditions some of which have permanently damaged them. To inform better and appropriate conservation practices, their physical behavior when exposed to environmental changes must be understood. The research conducted aimed to assess how the internal environment conditions in a historic building affects the tapestries’ structures and produce change in their strain. For this a series of experiments on a historic 19 th century tapestry inside an environmental chamber were carried out and cycles of moisture adsorption and desorption tested. Digital Image Correlation (DIC) and magnetic sensors developed by IBM were used to test successive stages of expansion and retraction of the tapestry given different levels of relative humidity (RH) in the environment. Peer-review under the responsibility of the organizing committee of the ICMB21.