Group description

The research team included in this expression of interest are part of the IBeA Research Group of Excellence. IBeA has the mention of excellence since 2002 and is composed nowadays by 33 members.

The research team included here are working in 2 main research areas, (a) sustainable urban built heritage and (b) terrestrial and space materials. A common activity for both areas of research is the construction of new spectroscopic instruments including the hardware and software parts.

The hardware requires the use of Advance 3D Manufacturing because some the spectroscopic devices require robust external and internal parts to avoid the problem of desalignment of the optical paths, maintain the optimized hardware calibration.

The software requires the handling of an enormous amount of data because these devices use 2D matrix detections. Depending on the surface to be measured and the required spatial resolution, a measurement can have a set of 1000x1000 pixels to map from 10x10 mm until 10x10 meters. Each pixel has a spectrum, thus 106 spectra must be handled per surface measured. With this initial set of data, we can obtain spectroscopic images at selected wavelengths, and these images (could be more than 100) are the layers of a complex cube (intensity, wavelength, concentration) that must be treated by machine learning tools to extract the useful information for process decision making protocols.

We have submitted to the Proof of Concept Call2021 of the Ministry of Science and Innovation (ref. PDC2021-121245-I00), a proposal to construct a Visible-Near Infrared instrument to be used for architects mapping facades of buildings at 120 meters of distance, covering surfaces of 100 m2. We wish to provide several “photographs” of the façade, first the visible image (like that obtained with a reflex camera of photos) and the image of the distribution of sulfates, the image for nitrates, the image for oxalates, the image of green biopatinas , the image of black biopatinas, the image of dust staining, or iron staining, etc. Sulfates, nitrates, biopatinas, staining, etc. are degradation processes on the surfaces of facades that must be diagnosed first to design the most adequate cleaning procedure for a good maintenance practice on those facades, specially thinking in facades of the Built Heritage elements.

This tool does not exist in the market. To have a feasible prototype, 3D printing for the spectroscopic parts of the instrument and development of software protocols based on machine learning treatments of spectroscopic data cubes must be covered. The postdoctoral researcher will be dedicated to both tasks, with the help of the team, to have a prototype that will be tested at the end of the project on-site. That prototype should work for architects as a click and view of the different optical and chemical images, to perform an initial diagnosis on-site and decide next actions for a complete diagnosis of the conservation state of the building.