Indoor air quality in museums. Monitoring and assessing of indoor pollution: a case study

In order to guarantee the best conservation of objects exposed inside museums and to evaluate the museum environment suitability to conserve artworks, indoor air monitoring (temperature and relative humidity) is of great importance together with sampling of indoor air pollutants. Sometimes the presence of an HVAC system is not enough to guarantee the best conservation of the exhibits; this for many reasons: bad systems design, poor maintenance and not proper operating procedures. Aim of this paper is to present first results of environmental conditions and indoor air quality monitoring inside a museum, during winter conditions. To achieve a comprehensive view of the problem the following parameters have been monitored: indoor air temperature, relative humidity, SO2, NO2, CO2, bacteria and fungi. These measures have been carried out both inside and outside some galleries of an important Italian museum equipped with an HVAC system. The HVAC system efficiency as a function of indoor pollution control, environmental conditions variations and visitors’ presence, has been evaluated. The galleries monitored have been chosen on the basis of the following parameters: visitors’ presence, building orientation and openings presence on internal courtyards or on traffic roads, kind of HVAC system.