Flexible mild heaters in structural conservation of paintings: State of the art and conceptual design of a new carbon nanotubes-based heater

INDEXED BY SCOPUS Thermal treatments constitute the core in the success for most structural treatments, such as consolidation, treating planar deformations, reinforcing degraded support and others. Among the wide range of devices for thermal treatments of paintings proposed in scientific and technical literature, flexible heaters appear to be the most promising technology, especially for working with large painting or in situ. The present paper provides a comprehensive review of flexible mild heater systems devised for structural conservation of paintings in the last decades, bringing forward the issues related to the instrumentation used for thermal treatments, stressing the importance of accurate control, and the inadequateness of available devices. By highlighting the actual limitations of existing devices, a different approach, which employs Carbon Nanotubes-based flexible heaters, is then proposed in its conceptual form. The design of such device, called IMAT (Intelligent Mobile Accurate Thermo-electrical device), is supported by the European Community in the context of the EC-FP7 Environment Theme (ENV-NMP.2011.2.2-5) into a three-year project started on November 2011.