PRÄVENT - Preventive Climate Management in Historic Buildings

Protecting and preserving valuable cultural assets requires conservation efforts. In addition to traditional restoration measures, preventative measures help to limit or ideally stop unwanted ageing or damage. This research project focuses on the optimisation of environmental and climatic conditions. The project relates to museums, libraries and other historical buildings that house art and cultural artefacts.

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 physics, technical and building climate quality is of a low standard - that house the cultural assets to be protected in the long term.
If the inherent utilisation limits of the building in terms of indoor climate conditions are then exceeded, this results in damage to both the building fabric and the cultural assets. In conjunction with the other boundary conditions resulting from the monetary aspects of operating and maintenance costs, there is great 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: Researching material-specific climate requirements
Part C: Further development of technical procedures for diagnosis