School of Physics - Research Publications

Permanent URI for this collection

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1

Film formation of artists' acrylic paints in tropical climates using dynamic speckle interferometry

Tse, NA ; MILES, E ; Roberts, A ; Saunders, ; Strlic, ; Korenberg, ; Luxford, ; Birkholzer, (Archetype Publications, 2013)

Understanding the production of twentieth-century paintings in tropical climates is critical for the preservation of twentieth-century art produced and located in these environments. Exploiting the characteristics of laser speckle, the research described in this contribution employs dynamic speckle interferometry (DSI) to analyse the film formation properties of three artists’ acrylic paint films prepared in diverse climatic conditions. With an increased relative humidity up to 73% RH, it is shown that the rate of activity or water evaporation is decreased, there is a delayed drying time and slightly less order compared to the same films cast in ambient conditions of 50% RH. Results also indicate that DSI is able to identify differences in film thickness, brushstroke direction and the inward drying of the acrylic paint films from the edge. Such information was obtained with DSI by statistically analysing rapid variation in dynamic speckle that produces temporal data from the paint surface and calculates the time history of the speckle pattern (THSP), co-occurence matrix (COM), inertia moment (IM) and wavelet entropy (WE).