Old oil paintings are a precious but vulnerable part of cultural heritage. The binding medium polymer chemically interacting with metal from pigments is degrading over many years of museal exposure and treatments. In order to better understand the chemistry and migration of degradation products models predicting the polymer network structure are developed from atomistic to macroscopic scales. The extreme chemical complexity of the historically interesting binding medium linseed oil is treated using automatic reaction network and kinetic model generation. The link between polymer network topology and thermomechanical properties is provided by Molecular Dynamics. Combining these two approaches constitutes a truly multiscale modeling approach of polymer materials.

Speaker Bio:

Piet Iedema is Professor of Chemistry at the Universiteit van Amsterdam working in the area of polymer modeling and oil paint degradation and author of a hundred papers in this area. Since more than ten years he is collaborating with the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in various projects concerning cultural heritage.