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Due to air pollution and natural weathering, many silicate relics are severely degraded and in urgent need of conservation. Generally, consolidation materials are introduced into weathered silicate relics in liquid form, then solidify within to re-strengthen the weathered heritages. Obviously, consolidation materials will fill the voids in heritages, especially voids near the surface, thus resulting in significant loss in vapor permeability. In this work, one-dimensional silica (ODS) is prepared in-situ via template method. ODS may form supporting network easily without clogging the pores. Evaluations on the mockup samples show that samples treated with appropriate ODS display high compressive strength, high air permeability and small colorimetric variation. The results show that the prepared ODS is highly potential for silicate relics conservation. Meanwhile, it is also found that the pre-reaction time in ODS preparation step has strong influences on the penetration and microstructure of the formed ODS, and eventually on the final conservation performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The complex and constantly changing environment of underwater excavation sites makes it extremely difficult to protect fragile cultural artifacts during excavation and to keep them intact in situ. It has mostly been through the control of conditions above water that these fragile relics have been extracted. Currently, the temporary solidity of a material named veratraldehyde can provide some temporary structural strength to relics underwater, allowing them to be brought to the surface and be handled on land. This material is, however, not perfect, and the search for better materials to enable the extraction of very fragile historical relics from below the surface of the water is still necessary. In this article, a large number of materials or substances were screened in comparison with veratraldehyde for efficacy in this process, and it was found that 4-dihydrochromone performed better and proved to be more suitable than veratraldehyde for this purpose. It was found that 4-dihydrochromone has a more suitable underwater crystallization time, higher compressive strength, and lower crystal shrinkage than veratraldehyde. Finally, 4-dihydrochromone was used to simulate the extraction of fragile underwater relics and was found to successfully strengthen the aging wooden woven frame to a sufficient degree that it could be transported onto land and restored to the state it was originally in while it was still underwater. This shows that 4-dihydrochromone is a superior material to use in the extraction process and that its ability to temporarily reinforce and extract fragile underwater cultural relics is better than that of veratraldehyde. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]