On 25 August at 14:15 Pilleriin Peets will defend her thesis "Development of instrumental methods for the analysis of textile fibres and dyes" for obtaining the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Chemistry).
Supervisors:
Signe Vahur (PhD), UT Institute of Chemistry
Prof. Ivo Leito (PhD), UT Institute of Chemistry
Opponent:
Anita Quye (PhD), University of Glasgow, Great Britain
Summary:
The aim of this thesis was to develop methods to analyse and identify textile fibres and natural red textile dyes in cultural heritage objects. Identification of these materials can be important to learn more about the origin, usage and condition of historical objects and also how to preserve and restore these artefacts.
For textile fibre identification, 16 different fibre types were analysed using ATR-FT-IR spectrometer (ATR-FT-IR), FT-IR microspectrometer with reflectance (r-FT-IR) and ATR (mATR-FT-IR) modes to create a standard collection of spectra that can be used for identification of fibre type of unknown textile samples. With r-FT-IR, identification can be totally non-invasive, highly beneficial for analysing valuable cultural heritage and archaeological finds.
For dye analysis, method development was done using seven natural red dyes and five different instrumental techniques – liquid chromatography with UV-Vis, fluorescence and mass-spectrometric (MS) detectors and direct high-resolution MS with ESI and MALDI sources using positive and negative ion modes. Combined usage of these instruments enabled to gain more information about the analysed natural dyes and thus making the identification of dyes from case-study samples more efficient.
In this work, a large collection of standard spectra and chromatograms was created, which is a helpful tool for identifying unknown fibres and dyes in cultural heritage objects, but also analysing forensic evidence or industrial products. The standard collection consists of more than 4000 ATR-FT-IR and r-FT-IR spectra from 16 different textile fibre types. Seven natural red dyes are characterised with 113 chromatograms/ spectra using five different instrumental techniques.
The usefulness of the developed methods was demonstrated by analysing several historical samples from Estonian National Museum, Conservation and Digitization Centre Kanut (Estonia) and private collections.
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