Experimental study of a local ventilation strategy to protect semi-exposed relics in a site museum

Indoor environmental controls are critical considerations when preserving artifacts in museums. Controlling the indoor environment of site museum buildings with large space layout typically consumes large amounts of energy. Most of the energy load needed to preserve relics is dissipated throughout the non-occupied space, because the environments that contain the relics occupy relatively little space compared to the entire exhibition hall. In this study, an energy effificient local ventilation system was proposed to independently control the environment of a funerary pit, which was preserved within a museum separate from the large exhibition hall. An experimental hall, which consists of a funerary pit and an experimental local ventilation system, was built to simulate a site museum building. Experiments were conducted to investigate the system’s performance and to validate its ability to preserve historical terracotta fifigurines in their semi-exposed pits within the exhibition hall. The study evaluated the stability of the conservation environment and the system’s energy usage by assessing the effects of the ventilation rate. The experimental results showed that the local ventilation system provides an energy-saving strategy supporting the environmental control of the funerary pit. The LV system signifificantly decreased temperature flfluctuations in the funerary pit and temperature differences across semi-exposed relics. The system could be used to control the local preservation environment of the funerary pit separately from a large space exhibition hall.

Experimental study on local environmental control for historical site in archaeological museum by evaporative cooling system

Environmental control of historical sites in archaeological museums faces challenges of high-energy consumption and complex soil-air coupled preservation environment. Many historical sites are not well preserved and undergo deterioration because of the desiccation cracking and salt enrichment. Moreover, the desiccation cracking cannot be prevented even if the air relative humidity (RH) is sustained to near-saturated state. This is due to the reason that migration of moisture from the historical site to air environment is a spontaneous one-way process. In the current work, a protection strategy, dealing with the air supplied into a “super-saturation” state through indirect-direct evaporative cooling (IDEC) and ultrasonic atomizing humidifification (UAH) units, was proposed to provide a stable preservation environment and suppress the relics’ deterioration. An experimental system, which consists of a simulated exhibition hall as well as an IDEC unit, was built. A series of tests were conducted to investigate the feasibility and performances of the system under different operational modes. The results show that: 1) the IDEC system could stabilize a preservation environment at the temperature of 24.4
C, and relative humidity (RH) of saturation state (RH ¼ 100%). The short-term flfluctuations of temperature and RH are ±1.7
C and ±0.0%, respectively, which conforms to the level-AA (risk-free) standard specifified in ASHRAE. Moreover, it could effectively recover water content of the dried soil environment for the historical sites. 2) The system could manipulate precise temperature when the auxiliary surface air cooler (SAC) unit is switched on. Compared with a traditional return air operational system, it saves 40% of the energy consumed. The proposed system is of high-effificiency and provides energy-saving for the environmental control of historical sites.

Thermal performance of a novel heating bed system integrated with a stack effect tunnel

The traditional widely used Chinese Kang heating system has been gradually becoming obsolete, due to the coal or wood burning emission that causes poor indoor air quality. In the interest to preserve the rural life, this study evaluated the performance of a retrofitted traditional Kang heating system with the use of alternative clean energy in a rural-dwelling in Xi’an, China. An air source heat pump (ASHP) was applied to drive the heating bed system, and an indoor stack effect tunnel was incorporated to induce the stack effect and to enhance the heating efficiency. A series of experiments were carried out by varying the exhaust tunnel height and heating mode. The system was shown to have produced significant improvement of the indoor air temperature and satisfied the Chinese standard, GB/T 50824–2013 for rural buildings. For the same mean outdoor temperature, when the stack effect tunnel height was extended from 1.0 m to 1.5 m, a 9.3% improvement in the heat release was obtained. When the heating mode changes from a single flue bottom surface heating to the combined flue bottom and vertical tunnel’s lateral surface heating, the enhancement was 43.9%. The system would provide a sustainable way to renovate, upgrade and preserve the traditional Kang system with a use of a cleaner energy source.

Evaluation of air curtain system orientated to local environmental control of archaeological museum: A case study for the stone armor pit of Emperor Qin’s Mausoleum Museum

Due to the lack of effffective environmental control systems, Emperor Qin’s Mausoleum Museum is facing problems of air pollution and excessive environmental flfluctuations, which threaten the protection of the unearthed historical relics. Air curtain systems have proven to be a feasible way to improve the preservation environment, and will be applied to Emperor Qin’s Mausoleum Museum. In order to identify the design requirements of the air curtain system, a theoretical model was employed to analyze the isolation effiffifficiency under difffferent scenarios, and the suitable operation parameter range of the air curtain system of the stone armor pit was then proposed. Based on the geometric structure of the stone armor pit, a computational flfluid dynamics (CFD) model was established, and the environmental control performance of the air curtain system was investigated in the case where the jet velocity and elevation angle are 6.0 m/s and 5。, respectively. The results show that the air curtain system can effffectively isolate the relics preservation area of the stone armor pit from the exhibition hall, ensuring the local environmental control of relics preservation. These results provide a basis for the design and operation of the air curtain system of the stone armor pit. Moreover, they provide an effffective solution for the local environmental control of relics in pit structure sites.