Over time, art and cultural heritage objects naturally degrade, largely due to environmental factors that affect their structure and appearance. Especially for paper-based cultural heritage items like – historical documents, ancient manuscripts, ephemeral flyers, currency, stamps, maps, books and graphic works, the most obvious consequences are fading, yellowing, and discolouration, causing serious and irreversible changes in all them. These visible effects not only diminish their aesthetic value but can also compromise the materials themselves, making preservation increasingly challenging over time. In this paper, we present a reversible and efficient solution for the conservation of paper-based cultural heritage objects using graphene membranes. Our approach employs large scale Chemical Vapour Deposition (CVD) graphene as a protective coating, which is non-invasive and does not alter the readability for the document or the optical appearance of the artwork. Graphene membranes act as protective shields, blocking humidity, oxidising agents and harmful radiation. Overall accelerated photo-ageing experiments have shown that a protection factor of 46% can be achieved for neat paper substrates indicating graphene's protective capability.
Gorgolis et al. (Wed,) studied this question.