Abstract:
Historical buildings are recognized as the valuable cultural heritage of a nation. They may suffer material deterioration unavoidably because of exposure to air pollution. This study used geographic information systems with dose-response functions (DRFs) to estimate the corrosion of five materials namely; copper, Portland limestone, carbon steel, zinc, and cast bronze. Their corrosion risks with regard to historical buildings in Bangkok were also examined. The first step was to find a suitable spatial interpolation method by comparing with observed air pollution and meteorological measurement data for 20102019 from 26 monitoring stations in Bangkok and its neighborhood with applying statistical performance measures. It reveals that the inverse distance weighting (IDW) was found to be the most suitable method among other three methods including Spline, Kriging (Ordinary) and Kriging (Universal). The concentrations of all pollutants in Bangkok, except PM10, decreased from 2010 to 2019. However, the prediction shows that all pollutants turn to increase in 2028. The results of spatial corrosion estimations indicated that in 2010, the corrosion of all materials were at acceptable levels, except for zinc and cast bronze. The estimated corrosion levels for 2019 and 2028 indicates that all materials in study area exceed their tolerable corrosion rates with considerably serious risks in 2028. Air pollution exposure time duration tends to be a key factor affecting the corrosion of materials. The results can be further used to establish active measures to reduce the rate of corrosion of historical buildings in Bangkok.