Climate-induced damage in historical cabinet doors

Climate-induced visual cracks or dimensional changes in historical art objects are aesthetically undesired. A thorough analysis of these aspects is essential for the development of adequate preservation strategies. For this purpose, in the present work full-scale experiments on mock-ups of historical cabinet doors were performed, and a numerical model was developed that can accurately simulate climate-induced damage development in oak wood. In contrast to what observation studies on historical museum objects indicate, the mock-ups showed no visible damage in terms of shrinkage cracks; a possible reason for this is that the local tensile strength of historical oak wood may be considerably lower than that of the new oak wood used for constructing the mock-ups. In the numerical model, the thermal and hygral responses were described by extended versions of Fourier's law of heat conduction and Fick's law of moisture diffusion. Discrete fracture is simulated by surrounding the continuum elements in a finite element model with interface elements equipped with a damage model. Preliminary numerical simulations give a good agreement with the solution of an analytical benchmark problem, and further show a realistic moisture hysteresis effect and damage pattern in the modelled sample.