The Corrosion Mechanism of Copper Artifacts Inlayed with silver,,gold and it's Electrochemical Behavior in different Corrosive media

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Faculty of Archeaolody -Cairo U niversity

2 Prof. of Physical Chemistry National Researches Center

3 Prof. in Restoration and conservation of Historical cities and monumental buildings. faculty of ArchaeologyCairo University

Abstract

The archaeological inlayed metal artifacts are wonderful fine art objects , the artists made their all efforts to make this art more rich and give it a high beautiful value. More great effort must be made in order to conserve these antiquties.

Inlaying : this process was carried out to enrich the copper artifact by silver, gold wires.

The inlayed artifacts are exposed to many processes such as extraction operations, forming and decorating processes. All these processes may cause a harmful effect such as deterioration caused by mechanical stress, deterioration occurs by mechanical stresses with chemical reactions such as (stress corrosion cracking – corrosion fatigue – hydrogen imbrittlement), deterioration occurs by thermal effect .

The damage may occur to the inlayed archeaological artifacts by the effect of the surrounding environments and the percentage of humidty which depends on salt concentration .The reactions between inlayed archaeological artifacts and their media may effect on metal surface or its core ,therefore the study of these reactions in defferent corrosive media and the corrosion products formed on it is very important to select the best methods for its treatment, conservation, exhibition and storage.The exprimental study was carried out to identify of the electrochemical behaviour of some Cu, Ag and Au alloys in some aqueous solutions and the formed corrosion products and its nature and ,compostion by using the weight loss technique, Inspection of the surface morphology of the treated samples by using Scanning Electron Microscope. Electrochemical methods, Open circuit–potential technique, Potentiodynamic anodic, cyclic polarization, , Galvanic corrosion measurements for Cu,Ag,Au alloys. Finally, according to these experiments many results were obtained, insured that the corrosion process depends on the kind of the corrosion environment, the concentration of salt ions and the time of the artifact being subjected to this environment.

Keywords

Main Subjects

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics