Stone porosity, wettability changes and other features detected by MRI and NMR relaxometry: a more than 15-year study

Scientists applying magnetic resonance techniques to cultural heritage are now a quite vast and international community, even if these applications are not yet well known outside this community. Not only laboratory experiments but also measurements in the field are now possible, with the use of portable nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) instruments that enable non-invasive and non-destructive studies on items of any size, of high artistic and historical value as well as diagnosis of their conservation state. The situation was completely different in the second half of the 1990s when our group started working on applications of NMR to cultural heritage, by combining the knowledge of NMR for fluids in porous media at the University of Bologna, with the skilfulness of the chemists for cultural heritage of CNR and University of Florence, and Safeguarding Cultural Heritage Department of Aosta. Since then, our interest has been mainly devoted to develop methods to study the structure of pore space and their changes as a result of the decay, as well as to evaluate performance of the protective and conservative treatments of porous materials like stone, ceramic, cements and wood. In this paper, we will review the pathway that led us from the first tentative experiments, in the second half of the 1990s to the current work on these topics.