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Current conservation approaches are shifting toward small, tailored, and less invasive interventions. Therefore the problems and best practices for conservators are becoming increasingly mobile. The future of art preservation heating systems will be with “intelligent” devices that are portable, flexible, reliable, and cost-effective. In this scenario, flexible heaters are becoming the preferred device for the application of heat in restoration since they can be shaped in different geometries and sizes, are easy to be transported and can be applied in the most versatile way with other treatment devices. Moreover, such devices can be applied also for in situ treatments, for instance, in emergency interventions. The development of these flexible devices comes from the past and, therefore, has a long history. To provide the reader with a comprehensive description of most innovative heating devices for art conservation, this chapter provides a brief history on how such devices evolved from the beginning to now, with the final aim of understanding the technological challenges and issues that allowed to continuously improve traditional heat tables and wound wire–based blankets toward the creation of innovative carbon nanotubes (CNTs)-based devices. After an historical investigation of heating devices, mostly based on heat tables, the chapter focuses on current technologies where nanomaterials are increasingly being used to boost the heating performance in several fields of application. Finally this work describes the main outcomes of a recent European Project, which applied CNTs-based coating on flexible substrates to create the first prototypes of intelligent mobile heaters to be adopted extensively by conservators. A number of applications of this new kind of device are eventually proposed and discussed.

The research and development of new conservation materials and instrumentation and the integration of contemporary science into the discipline are of fundamental importance in formulating best practices in conservation and preserving cultural heritage assets. With this goal in mind in November 2011, the IMAT project (Intelligent Mobile Accurate Thermo-Electrical mild heating device) was launched under the European Commission's 7th Framework Program (FP7) for research. During the three-year length of the project, coordinated by the University of Florence, a European consortium of researchers representing expertise in conservation, nanotechnology, and thermo-electrical engineering will develop nanotechnology for the IMAT devices specifically designed for highly accurate mild heating in conservation of artworks and other cultural heritage assets.

Mild heating devices currently available to conservators are still limited in terms of precision, versatility, mobility, accessibility and cost. Moreover, they lack a range of operational features, such as low power requirements, efficient power use, temperature stability and uniform heat distribution. Carbon nanotubes-based technologies can provide a wide range of technical solutions for overcoming these limitations, thereby allowing the development of more precise, flexible and portable heating devices. This work describes the design of an innovative carbon nanotube-based intelligent mobile accurate thermo-electrical mild heating device, to be used in the art conservation field. The device consists of three different types of flexible heating mats with different designs (opaque and ultra-thin/woven and breathable/transparent) and different operational and physical properties. The entire heating system is completed by a control unit that controls, monitors and registers the heating and by a power supply unit. First tests performed on a series of prototypes of the designed heaters showed that the device was able to convey uniform heating on different working materials, thus proving to be effective for thermal consolidation.