Abstract
Painted wood panels of cultural heritage (furnitures, musical instruments, paintings...) are often sensitive to several loadings such as mechanical restraint, as well as humidity and temperature cycles due to the hygrothermal variations of the surrounding environment. To improve preventive conservation and to guide restoration acts on wooden artworks, virtual testing via numerical simulation is necessary to assess a risk analysis, in order to predict if the object will remain safe under various scenarii. We focus herein on a numerical strategy, belonging to the family of partitioning schemes, to solve the coupled problem of thermo-hygro-mechanical response of wood structures. A dedicated code is used for thermal and moisture transfer, while a structural code is used for the mechanical response. With the modularity of a partitioning scheme, the code coupling is used with minimized intrusion, when compared to monolithic codes. Our aim is to assess the risk resulting from the change of ambient conditions and make the appropriate decision for preventive conservation. Therefore we propose a method to evaluate the riskiness of some likely-to-happen climate variations, and conclude on possible interventions on the panel.