AIC 53rd Annual Meeting

In recent decades, conservators and conservation scientists have proposed additions and refinements to the conservation cleaning toolkit, drawing inspiration from allied fields and leveraging expertise from industrial chemists and soft matter scientists. As a result, the field has seen continued progress toward options with improved control and specificity while also favoring materials and techniques that are more sustainable and safer for the practitioner and the environment.

Inspired by conservators’ creative adaptations of rigid physical hydrogels and the working properties of chemical hydrogels adopted by the field in recent years, this paper describes the development of physical hydrogels that are thermoreversible, optically clear, cohesive, flexible, and conformable with surprising elasticity and gel strength. Drawing from food science, haute cuisine, and traditional foodways, the shared formulations are based on the synergistic binding of xanthan gum and konjac glucomannans modified with a second network of agar or agarose. These versatile, cost-effective gels are simple to produce and are compatible with typical aqueous preparations used in conservation cleaning. Additionally, these hydrogels provide options for delivery of small proportions of organic solvents and microemulsions capable of swelling and removing tenacious coatings and overpaints with minimal mechanical action. Analogous formulations substituting other glucomannans or galactomannans and selecting agar instead of agarose offer flexible decision-making favoring economic and environmental sustainability by sourcing materials native to many regions around the globe.

The development of xanthan-konjac/agar gels and their analogs has been informed by early tests in several cross-specialty professional workshops and academic courses, providing key insights into how this versatile addition to the cleaning toolkit complements our established range of rigid gels, viscous polymeric solutions and spreadable gels, viscoelastic gels, and chemical hydrogels. Case studies from collaborators will be shared in another proposed submission.