Approaching the initial Surface appearance of Tarnished silver heritage objects by Electrolytic Cleaning - Definition of optimal treatment conditions (ASTEC)

ASTEC project focused on defining appropriate parameters during electrolytic cleaning of tarnished silver objects in order to best approach their original surface appearance. It required the collection of information on the surface appearance of the objects during their manufacture, the study of the different forms of tarnishing and their evolution during the treatment, as well as the characterization of the metal surface obtained at the end of the treatment. The research was carried out on two corpuses of objects, reflecting the variety of tarnish layers on different metal surfaces. They were used to manufacture metal coupons designed to simulate real artifacts as closely as possible. The cleaning parameters were first defined on these coupons before being applied to a selection of objects from the two corpuses.