Study of the effect of the strategy of heating on the mudejar church of Santa Maria in Ateca (Spain) for preventive conservation of the altarpiece surroundings

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 13; no. 9; pp. 11407 - 11423
• Main Authors: García-Diego, Fernando-Juan, Fernández-Navajas, Angel, Beltrán, Pedro, Merello, Paloma
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 26.08.2013; MDPI
• Subjects: Climate; climate control system; Cultural heritage; Environmental Monitoring - instrumentation; Environmental Monitoring - methods; Equipment Design; Equipment Failure Analysis; Heating; Heating - methods; Humidity; Mechanical properties; Moisture content; preventive conservation; Religious organizations; Reproducibility of Results; Seasons; Sensitivity and Specificity; Sensors; Spain; Spanish cultural heritage; temperature and humidity sensors; Thermography - instrumentation; Transducers; Spain; Norway
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s130911407

The mudéjar church of Santa María (Ateca) is valuable for its architecture and the altarpiece contained inside. Ateca is a village with continental climate characterized by cold winters and hot summers. In this paper we are interested in analysing the effect of temperature and relative humidity (RH) changes produced by the heating system on the altarpiece. Therefore, a monitoring system of 15 temperature and 15 relative humidity sensors was installed with a recording frequency of a data point per minute. The main contribution of this paper is the quantitative study of the effect of the heating system on the thermo-hygrometric parameters using statistical techniques such as ANOVA, mean daily trajectories or bivariate plots, and the proposal of an innovative dynamic contour plot. As results, the heating system produces a substantial increase (decrease) of temperature (RH) causing an hourly variation of these physical parameters detrimental to the conservation of the altarpiece, especially in its higher areas.