A global transition towards more sustainable, affordable and reliable energy systems is being stimulated by the Paris Agreement and the United Nation's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This poses a challenge for the corrosion industry, as building climate‐resilient energy systems and infrastructures brings with it a long‐term direction, so as a result the long‐term behaviour of structural materials (mainly metals and alloys) becomes a major prospect. With this in mind “Corrosion Challenges Towards a Sustainable Society” presents a series of cases showing the importance of corrosion protection of metals and alloys in the development of energy production to further understand the science of corrosion, and bring the need for research and the consequences of corrosion into public and political focus. This includes emphasis on the limitation of greenhouse gas emissions, on the lifetime of infrastructures, implants, cultural heritage artefacts, and a variety of other topics.

Digitalization techniques, such as photogrammetry (PG), are attracting the interest of experts in the cultural heritage field, as they enable the creation of three-dimensional virtual replicas of historical artifacts with 2D digital images. Indeed, PG allows for acquiring data regarding the overall appearance of an artifact, its geometry, and its texture. Furthermore, among several image-based techniques exploited for the conservation of works of art, multispectral imaging (MSI) finds great application in the study of the materials of historical items, taking advantage of the different responses of materials when exposed to specific wavelengths. Despite their great usefulness, PG and MSI are often used as separate tools. Integrating radiometric and geometrical data can notably expand the information carried by a 3D model. Therefore, this paper presents a novel research methodology that enables the acquisition of multispectral 3D models, combining the outcomes of PG and MSI (Visible (VIS), Ultraviolet-induced Visible Luminescence (UVL), Ultraviolet-Reflected (UVR), and Ultraviolet-Reflected False Color (UVR-FC) imaging) in a single coordinate system, using an affordable tunable set-up and open-source software. The approach has been employed for the study of two wooden artifacts from the Museo Egizio di Torino to investigate the materials present on the surface and provide information that could support the design of suitable conservation treatments.

This paper describes an approach to develop and deploy low-cost plastic optical fiber sensors suitable for measuring low concentrations of pollutants in the atmosphere. The sensors are designed by depositing onto the exposed core of a plastic fiber thin films of sensitive compounds via either plasma sputtering or via plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD). The interaction between the deposited layer and the gas alters the fiber’s capability to transmit the light, so that the sensor can simply be realized with a few centimeters of fiber, an LED and a photodiode. Sensors arranged in this way exhibit several advantages in comparison to electrochemical and optical conventional sensors; in particular, they have an extremely low cost and can be easily designed to have an integral, i.e., cumulative, response. The paper describes the sensor design, the preparation procedure and two examples of sensor prototypes that exploit a cumulative response. One sensor is designed for monitoring indoor atmospheres for cultural heritage applications and the other for detecting the presence of particular gas species inside the RPC (resistive plate chamber) muon detector of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN in Geneva.

This paper describes a portable low-cost device for performing Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) measurements which is based on an off-the-shelf TeensyDuino. The instrument does not make use of other components like operational amplifiers so it can be readily set up by anyone having a Teensy device and some resistors. Teensy 3.2, 3.5 and 3.6 can be used to realize the EIS system. The instrument can measure the impedance in the frequency range from 0.01 Hz to 50000 Hz and by selecting the shunt resistor it can be adapted to different impedance values. No special instrumentation is required for the system calibration. The proposed system uncertainty is of less than 5% for an impedance of up to 50 Ωk, a value which is lower than the usual intrinsic uncertainty of most of corrosion experiments.

Diagnostic physical methods are increasingly applied to Cultural Heritage both for scientific investigations and conservation purposes. In particular, the X-ray imaging techniques of computed tomography (CT) and digital radiography (DR) are non-destructive investigation methods to study an object, being able to give information on its inner structure. In this paper, we present the results of the X-ray imaging study on an ancient Egyptian statuette (Late Period 722–30 BCE) belonging to the collection of Museo Egizio in Torino and representing an Egyptian goddess called Taweret, carved on wood and gilded with some colored details. Since few specific studies have been focused on materials and techniques used in Ancient Egypt for gilding, a detailed investigation was started in order to verify the technical features of the decoration in this sculpture. Specifically, DR and CT analyses have been performed at the Centro Conservazione e Restauro “La Venaria Reale” (CCR), with a new high resolution flat-panel detector, that allowed us to perform tomographic analysis reaching a final resolution better than the one achievable with the previous apparatus operating in the CCR.