Contribution to the enhancement of cultural heritage conservation in Mexico City

The company CAV Diseño e Ingeniería, in charge of dismantling the mosaics and demolishing the SCOP Center in Mexico City, has jointly contracted a multidisciplinary research team from the University of Valladolid (UVa), coordinated by Alberto Izquierdo Fuente, and the Santa María la Real del Patrimonio Histórico Foundation, to apply preventive conservation criteria to guarantee the proper conservation of the murals.

In essence, the procedure is based on mounting metal self-supporting packaging on the walls supporting the murals, decoupling these walls together with the building’s mosaics using diamond wire cutting techniques, and finally lowering the murals to the ground with their associated concrete walls by means of two cranes. Throughout this process, the multidisciplinary group of the UVa (integrated by researchers from the Array Processing GIR, the Structural Dynamics Group and the Structures and Wood Technology GIR) has developed 4 acquisition and processing equipment that analyzes in real time the state of vibration and generates a visual and audible warning at the site while saving the statistics and significant records in the Monitoring Heritage System platform of the Santa María la Real Foundation of Historical Heritage.

The objectives in this project are:

Real-time on-site warning of a vibration level exceeding a threshold and therefore being able to stop and/or modify site operations on the walls supporting the murals.
Record the levels of these vibrations (maximum, average, etc.) periodically.
Record time signals when a warning is generated.
Model and analyze the vibration levels experienced by the murals during cutting and moving operations from their current location (vertical position) to their storage (horizontal position).