In situ Assessment of Conservation Treatments and Monitoring of Their Effectiveness

In this chapter an overview of the main invasive/non-invasive techniques used in situ for the evaluation of conservation treatments is provided. The conservation treatments considered are cleaning, consolidation, and protection of stone, mainly for architectural heritage. After a brief introduction, a paragraph is dedicated to the current process of rafting the standards, starting from previous experiences. In each paragraph dealing with conservation treatments, a reminder of commonly used laboratory tests carried out n stone samples, following either standardized protocols or not, are briefly reported. Details about testing protocols and threshold values for the selection of the best onservation treatment and for the monitoring are described.