The objects of this investigation were sculptures taken from a ca. three hundred years old baroque epitaph of a church in Tonning, a town in Northern Germany. Around 1900 it was found in a disastrous state heavily damaged by wood-worm. At that time, the whole artwork was treated with the tar extract carbolineum as a remedy. Nowadays, this substance has been identified as carcinogenic, and its presence can be perceived by its stench and visually at certain spots on the surface where it has penetrated the covering paint.
A gold-painted sculpture of a massive wooden skull was interrogated with X-rays and fast neutrons to investigate the internal distribution of the carbolineum. The X-ray tomography, with its excellent spatial resolution revealed galleries left over from the worm infestation in the outer areas and cracks in the central region. The golden color coating appeared as a thick and dense layer. In comparison the tomography with fast neutrons, though being of lower resolution and yet unresolved artefacts revealed sections of slightly different densities in the bulk of the wood. These differences we attribute to the differences in the distribution of the impregnant in the wood, visible due to its higher hydrogen content making it less transparent for neutrons.
While the absorption of X-rays and gamma radiation is determined by the Z-number of the elements a specimen is composed of, it is the hydrogen making an effective contrast with neutron imaging. As a consequence, interrogating with neutrons presents a suitable tool to study the distribution of organic consolidants in materials such as wood as encountered in impregnated wooden artworks.
Four different examples of objects are presented here to demonstrate the potential of neutron CT: 1) small wooden pieces of ship wrecks (< 2 cm thickness) interrogated with cold neutrons (0.5 meV at the ANTARES facility of the FRM II in Garching) to demonstrate the potential and the limitation of using low energy neutrons, 2) a wooden statue soaked with carbolineum (fission neutrons 1.8 MeV at the NECTAR facility of the FRM II), 3) a smaller wooden figure of a skull heavily soaked with carbolineum so it was too tight for the fission neutrons used before with accelerator neutrons (broad range about 5.5 MeV at the PTB in Braunschweig) and 4) pieces of charred wood to study the impregnation with a consolidant (NECTAR, FRM II). With the exception of the last example, all results have been combined with X-ray tomography (BAM 8.3 in Berlin). In the case of the charred wood specimens (example 4) the density histograms of the neutron tomography results were compared with those obtained from untreated references. The observed gain in specific density of the soaked specimens corresponded with an increase of specific weight. All results obtained so far showed distinct distribution patterns attributable to structural peculiarities or organic consolidants providing valuable support for subsequent restoration works.