PRÄVENT - Preventive Climate Management in Historic Buildings

Project Objective:

The protection and preservation of valuable cultural assets require conservation efforts. In addition to the classic measures of restoration, preventive measures help to limit or, ideally, stop undesirable ageing or damage. This research project focuses on optimising the environmental and climatic conditions. The project relates to museums, libraries or other buildings of historical construction that house art and cultural assets.

Although it is known that ageing or damage processes are caused by unfavourable absolute values or alternating loads of the environmental parameters, in many cases it is precisely buildings of historical construction – i.e. those whose building-physical, technical and building-climatic quality is of a low standard – that house the cultural assets to be protected in the long term.
If the inherent limits of the building's use in terms of indoor climate conditions are then exceeded, both the building fabric and the cultural assets will be damaged. In conjunction with the further boundary conditions resulting from the monetary aspects of operating and maintenance expenses, there is a high level of interest in a strategy for the cost-effective preservation of building fabric and cultural assets.

• HS-Fulda (Prof. Dr.-Ing Cuno):
  Development of the technical components of a modular guidance and assistance system for museums and historical libraries.
• University of Applied Sciences Potsdam (Prof. Lorenz)
  Part-A: Systematisation of the planning process
  Part-B: Research into material-specific climate requirements
  Part-C: Further development of technical procedures for diagnosis