Nanomaterials-based heating devices for Cultural Heritage application: a patent survey

Conservation practices are aimed to implement minimal, targeted and less invasive treatments. The conservation profession’s challenges and best practices are therefore becoming more global and mobile, especially when dealing with treatments involving temperature (e.g. painting conservation). The near future of heating devices in art conservation will be with mobile, versatile, accurate and cost effective “smart” devices. For these reasons, the design and manufacturing of heating mats for applications in the Cultural Heritage field moved from early concepts mainly based on electrically heated mats towards more accurate thermo-electrical mild heating devices, especially based on nanomaterials. Despite great scientific efforts have been spent in the last years to create more efficient devices for conservation, there is still room for practically implementing them and, moreover, for protecting new concepts by patenting them. To help the scientific community in getting an overview on the patent state of the art on this important sector, the present work is aimed to provide a survey of patents related to nanomaterials-based heaters to be adopted for artworks conservation. Starting from early works, the paper explore recent patents by selecting the domains referred to nanotechnology sector that are mainly relevant for the heating devices field.