Investigation of patinas formed on Chinese bronzes using modern multianalytical techniques

摘要

This paper presents an integrated study on nine natural Chinese bronze patinas without causing any damage to the bronze substrates, employing five modern analytical techniques including X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) and Raman spectroscopy, inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectroscopy (ICP-AES), and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). Two artificial Chinese bronze patinas were also investigated by the same techniques for comparative purposes. As a result, XRD determined the chemical compositions of all selected samples and showed that the primary compound was malachite in natural soil environment under the general situation. Meanwhile, some interesting corrosion products such as gerhardtite and free copper were also observed. Three groups were classified according to the XRD results in order to provide a deeper insight into their spectroscopic characterization. Spectroscopic data of these patinas from FT-IR and Raman spectroscopy are shown and interpreted in detail. ICP-AES and ICP-MS analyses provided valuable quantitative information, and made the study of the patinas more profound. Furthermore, all analytical results indicated that bronze patinas are extremely complex by virtue of the storage environment and their substrate alloys. The natural samples were rather heterogeneous and the artificial samples, especially the sample formed in the laboratory, were rather homogeneous of which the chemical constituents could be well defined. Copyright (c) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.