Team:WHU-China/Inspiration

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Visit Story Research Methods comparison Preliminary experiments

Inspiration

Visit

Eva, one of our team members, took a trip to Hunan Provincial Museum. There displayed many relics unearthed from Mawangdui Han Tombs. Among the delicate exhibits, a suit of garment shocked her. It belonged to the Marquise of Dai , with a history of 2100 years. The garment was extremely light just as smoke and even thin like cicada wings, it beyond her imagination that its total weight was just 49 grams! Driven by the shock, Eva explored the history behind it.

Story

This garment called ‘Plain Gauze Garments(素纱襌衣)’ . There were two pieces before, one was straight fringing, another was curve.

In 1972, Archaeologists unearthed three tombs dating from the Western Han dynasty. The excavation was considered as one of the most important archaeological findings of the 20th century. In this excavation, more than 3,000 pieces of fabrics, silk paintings and other relics were unearthed, including the garments.

The garments were thought to be the tissue outside outfits or a kind of underwear, according to some archaeologists. They were so light and thin that even could be folded into a match box. They represented the highest level of textile technology in the Western Han Dynasty.

But in 1983, a 17 teenage broke into the museum, stole 38 valuable cultural relics including these two pieces of garments. On his way to escape, he threw one of them down the drain, it was not found up to now. Fortunately, the other was found back, with breakage.How to restore and preserve this valuable fabrics became a problem needed relics workers consider carefully.

Realizing the torturous history and witnessing the delicate garment with variegated weak areas, an idea struck Eva. She wanted to do something for this precious relics and those other silk relics facing similar problems. It became the start point of our project.

Research

In order to learn more about the situations of silk relics, we did human practices by visiting museums. We got that due to the sudden change of environment after unearthed and long years of display, many fabrics relics is facing some thorny issues:

• Irregular reduction in strength


• Aging fibers


• Broken molecular chains


• Risk of molds infection


• …

Through our further investigation, we found that it is urgent to protect and restore the fragile cultural relics.In China, there are many cultural relics restorers are engaged in such work. In order to learn more knowledge about cultural relics restoration from them, we visited some museums and cultural relics conservation centers.

Through the trip to Jingzhou Culture Conservation and Restoration Center, we knew the whole processes of restoration as below and decided to focus our project on the reinforcement steps of restoration.

Methods comparison

After deciding to work on reinforcement, we did the literature survey. We found there were three main types of methods in silk relics’ reinforcement:

• Physical method: use needles and threads to sew with another cloth under the weak area.


• Chemical method: use synthetic material (usually are macromolecule cross-linking agents) to reinforce the relics.


• Biological method: use natural or the genetic engineering products to reinforce.

We compared these methods:

Thus, we decided to apply the method of synthetic biology to relics reinforcement.

Preliminary experiments

After enough investigations and researches, we did preliminary experiments in order to verify the reinforcement effect. During the experiments, we found other problems, the silk relics face the mold contamination and photoaging! We could solve these problems by functionalizing the reinforcement material.

So it came our project this year, reinforce and funcionalize the silk relics by synthetic biological method!