Prediction and classification of the degradation state of plastic materials used in modern and contemporary art

Today, artworks partially or completely made of plastic materials can be found in almost all international museums and collections. The deterioration of these objects is now becoming evident mainly because these synthetic materials are not designed for a long life and the characterization of their state of conservation can help curators and conservators. In this research we investigated the applicability of a portable attenuated total reflection (ATR) infrared spectrometer for the non-invasive characterization and for monitoring the degradation of plastics used in modern and contemporary art. Several polypropylene and polycarbonate samples were artificially aged in solar box, simulating about 200 years of museum light exposure, and they were monitored with the portable ATR, creating an infrared library of the conservation state of plastics. Through the use of chemometric techniques like principal component analysis–linear discriminant analysis and partial least square—discriminant analysis, we built a robust degradation model of each material that can be used to predict and classify the degradation state of artworks and to identify the priority of intervention in the museum collections. Portable ATR coupled to multivariate statistics can be employed for taking care of plastic artworks as it is non-invasive, the analysis is very fast and it can be performed directly in situ.