The proposed technology takes advantages of the huge potentialities of the gellan gum microgels in the preservation of cultural heritage. Microgels are polymeric gels particles with the micro and nanoscale size, whose soft nature is due to the presence of the aqueous solvent inside the particle. For their small size, they can easily diffuse in the environment and penetrate in the porous structure of paper and wood to act as cleaner agent. This technology has been defined in its basic concept and validated in laboratory showing promising results in the treatment of ancient paper. Now, an optimized implementation is taking place to increase the efficacy and to extend its use to artefacts of different nature, such as modern paper and wood. Since the technology is based on gellan gum, a well-known material in the cultural heritage sector, it already complies with the needs of the restorers because it allows a low stress treatment for the paper and gives the possibility to have a cleaning material which can be easily prepared and stored in the context of the small laboratories of restorers.
With respect to conventional methods used for ancient paper treatment, i.e. wet cleaning (invasive for the artifact) or cleaning by macroscopic gels, as gellan hydrogels, the proposed microgels are able to clean the artefacts more effectively and in a shorter time (few minutes with respect to 1 hour application of the hydrogel), with lower costs with respect to the currently used gel or enzyme-based technologies. Moreover, the edible nature of gellan makes the technology green, biocompatible, safe for the restorers and environmental friendly. Gellan can be chemically modified by anchoring molecules to its carbonyl and hydroxyl groups thus improving the physical-chemical properties of the microgel or conferring new cleaning functionalities. The proposed technology is versatile and can be easily adapted to several developments and applications, as the treatment of modern paper and wood artifacts, to obtain an effective cleaning which takes into account the different composition and structure of these artifacts, with respect to ancient paper, and of the different characteristics of wood, depending on the natural source and treatment.