The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry hosts guest speaker Richard C. Wolbers, associate professor of art conservation at the University of Delaware. His topic will be "Engineering Protective Coatings for Public Art: Conservation, Chemistry, Community."

The seminar will be preceded by a reception at 4:30 p.m., in the Anderson Lounge, behind Craig Auditorium.

Sponsored by the Ray Alte Blumeno Lectureship Fund.

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The engineering of appropriate protective coatings for public art in both indoor and outdoor settings is especially challenging given the need for reversibility from extremely sensitive surfaces. Murals created from acrylic paints for instance are sensitive to both aqueous and solvent systems that would be normally be needed to apply or remove highly weather resistant protective coatings on general building or monument surfaces. In particular, in the city of Philadelphia, for instance, approximately 3500 building-sized murals have been created under the auspices of the Mural Arts Program there from commercially available water-based acrylics (Golden Acrylic Colors, Nova Color, etc.). The wide range of building surfaces types (masonry, cementitious, metallic, etc.) that these murals have been created on further challenge the engineering of an appropriate protective coating system.  High moisture vapor transmission rate (MTVR) and mechanical and physical properties that match both artist’s paints and building substrates alike also are critical design factors. City, state and federal requirements for increasingly lower VOC application and removal methods generally dictate that any coating be applied and removed with aqueous methods only. While many protective coatings exist presently in water dispersion form for application, few, if any, can be safely removed without solvent use, and/or severe mechanical damage to the artist’s paints. Our research group has developed a coating system of exceptionally high durability, but one that can be both a “water-on” and “water –off” type of system over artist’s acrylic paints in particular.  The coating represents a novel blending of stable acrylic and poly acrylic acid moieties to tailor the physical and chemical properties of the coating (including MVTR) and reversing pH.