Abstract
Conservation or restoration of many ancient wooden artefacts such as panel paintings is made difficult. In addition by issues linked to wood ageing, but also by the delicate situations originaling from asymmetrical moisture transfer phenomena through surface layer and wooden substrate. Conservators have tried to eradicate panels curvatures by moistening and flattening by pressure ; or simply in term of restoration act, by panel thinning followed by gluing on a rigid support. Between fortunate handling and absence of environmental control, some paint layers flaked material was partially lost, cracks opened. Indeed, the artefacts from cultural heritage that we handle are the witness of ancient times and practices, and may provide keys to the understanding of long-term behaviour of wooden structures. First, we have focused on the basic understanding of wood aging, we have made hygro-thermal treatment at 120degree C for several humidities and at 50degree C by hydric cycles on poplar samples (Populus alba). We underlined physical and chemical process and the reversible effect of heat-treated wood. Then we studied the behaviour of a painted panel part, and the relation between wood and preparatory layer. Our work shows clearly that the hygromechanical behaviour of the preparatory layer is very dependent on its composition, and that it is important to know precisely the layer composition before being able to analyse the global behavior of a panel painting. Finally, our work concerned experimental and numerical study of hygromechanical behaviour of a wooden panel, based on continuous mass weighting and measurement of strain by stereo-correlation during hygrothermal fluctuations of the environment. We decoupled experimentally the different components occurring in hygromechanics of panel painting, and we worked to set up a numerical tool allowing the simulation of observed phenomena. This thesis presents, on a fundamental point of view, the wooden panel behavior under climatic fluctuations, linking with cultural conservator actors (such as curators, conservators, scientists from cultural heritage dots) in order to develop tools to decision help.