- When I was a little
girl I was fascinated
by the people that came
before me and their history.
In the fifth grade I even
helped unearth objects
created by a vanished culture.
When you think about
it it's pretty amazing
that we even have a lot
of these ancient objects
in museums throughout the world.
Given they're under constant
attack from corrosive gases
in the environment that
cause severe damage.
Silver, a metal prize throughout history
is especially susceptible to tarnishing.
I'm sure you're noticed the black,
silver sulfide tarnish layer
that you have to polish off
your jewelry at home.
While polishing may seem harmless,
it actually damages the
object by removing metal.
So, with too much polishing you'll lose
all of the fine details at the surface.
The best way to protect your
silver is to apply a coating,
and currently museums
use a plastic coating
that lasts about 10 years.
At that 10 year mark, the
coating has to be removed,
the silver polished and
a new coating applied.
For museums with thousands
of silver objects
this creates a nearly constant cycle
of damage and recoating.
My research is looking to break that cycle
by creating a new coating
enabled by nanotechnology.
I'm looking at replacing
the plastic coating
with a new transparent
ceramic coating that I apply
one atomic layer at a time.
This technique is called Atomic
Layer Deposition, or ALD.
And this atomic level control
over the coating thickness
allows me to create films
that are nearly invisible.
In fact, when I did a blind
study with art conservators
they were unable to distinguish between
a silver knife with an ALD
coating and one without.
By using these dense ceramic coatings
instead of spongy plastic corrosive gases
take longer to move through the films.
I compared how long the ceramic
and plastic films would last
by accelerating the natural
aging process in the lab.
I found that the ceramic ALD films lasted
about 15 times longer
than the plastic coatings.
That's a huge improvement.
For art conservators this means that
instead of every 10 years
they could wait 150 years before having
to polish and reapply coating.
Additionally, I found a
way to completely remove
the ceramic films without damaging
or significantly changing
the silver object.
This is a critical step if
we ever wanna use these films
on real art objects.
So, not only do these
ALD films last longer,
but they can be removed without damage
and reapplied in the future.
Ever since I was little
I felt it was important
to connect to the people
that came before me
through the objects they left behind.
Advances in nanotechnology,
especially ALD,
allow us to better protect these objects,
so that one day we can pass them on to
our future generations and
they too can understand
our common past.
