PostDoc Position Collection Care

Functieomschrijving

This vacancy is within the chair of Applied Mechanics of the department of the Built Environment. The chair is responsible for education and research in the field mechanics, and is working on multi-scale, multi-physics and optimization problems related to the built environment. The chair provides the mechanics courses in the Department of the Built Environment, and is a member of the Graduate School on Engineering Mechanics, Netherlands. This graduate school offers the PhD students and PostDocs an advanced training program in the field of Engineering Mechanics, of which the core is formed by a joint series of advanced graduate courses that are closely connected to state-of-the-art research themes.



Research Topic:

Paper based materials exhibit significant deformations upon moisture content variations, involving dimensional changes at different length scales. These may be also accompanied by irreversible shrinkage and accelerated creep phenomena. Additionally, spontaneous chemical degradation of paper may occur, due to oxidation processes taking place at the level of the crystalline structure and in the polymer chains of cellulose. These are crucial problems in the conservation of paper-based ancient documents.

The goal of this PostDoc project is to perform experimental work to understand and predict paper degradation and aging of historical documents, in order to formulate physically based conservation practice guidelines to be used by conservators.

The project is embedded within a H2020 project with contributions from a large international consortium of partners, led by the Polythenical University of Valencia (Spain), and including several important research institutions (e.g. Universitá La Sapienza, Italy; KADK, Denmark) and museums (e.g. The Royal Danish Collection, Denmark; Koninklijke Musea Voor Kunst En Geschiedenis, Belgium; Istoriki Ethnologiki Etaireia Elladas, Greece).

Tasks

The PostDoc project at the Chair of Applied Mechanics of the Department of the Built Environment will focus on the study of the long term response of paper based artefacts, through a multi-scale and multi-physics approach. Paper is a complex multi-scale material mainly consisting of cellulose fibres bonded to each other to form a discrete network. A model to describe chemical and mechanical degradation of the fibrous network is currently being developed by a PhD student enrolled in the same project. The experiments will focus on measuring mechanical and chemical properties of paper at both the sheet level and the fiber level as a function of time, allowing to quantify the extent of degradation due to both the hysteretic response of the material upon moisture cycles and the chemical damage associated to cellulose degradation.

Functie-eisen