Practical Use of Damage Functions for Environmental Preventive Conservation and Sustainability—Examples from Naturally Ventilated Buildings
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The title is too generic. In the main title or in subtitle keywords such as "response functions", "deterioration factors", " preventive conservation", "naturally ventilated buildings" could be present. Otherwise, the reader is misleading about the content of the paper.
Sentences to generic like:
1-" The materials forming cultural heritage are almost never fully characterised (possibly with the exception of some iconic objects), and their processing methods are only roughly known." reveal that the author knows very few about historical stone and brick masonries techniques or carpentry old techniques. A great deal of bibliography is available on those topics and the author should read and cite them instead of referring that they do not exist.
2- "There has been a reluctance in the conservation field to accept modelling results to make environmental decisions" is just a generic assumption without any bibliographic reference or example given.
Section headings are not consistent: Section 2 "Physical damage to rigid hygroscopic organic materials" should be called "RH and temperature related damages" to be coherent with Section 3 "Mould growth". The paper should be structured under topics like deterioration causes, deterioration mechanisms or damages. Those topics or levels of analysis are not coherently addressed in the section headings.
The reason for the choice of the different case studies is not clear. What were the criteria used to choose the presented case studies and not other case studies. Anything is said about the age/historical period/ technique used to elaborate the deteriorated artifacts under analysis.
There is no correlation between the graphics with analysis results and the materiality of the case studies. No photos of the spaces or the deteriorated materials are presented.
Representativity of the studied materials should be addressed. For example, when corrosion is studied why only Portland stone, cast bronze and carbon steel are studied? Anything is said why cast iron, copper, zinc , for example, are not studied.
Author Response
please see attached file
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper presents interesting experimental results and a good interaction between different correlated topics.
I have just a suggestion: to improve references in the first part, mainly in the introduction, where many sentences are provided without a support. I suggest also to cite different sources and not only self-citations (Many of the cited work are signed by the author). There are many studies in this field, a very known author in the area, is for example Dario Camuffo who studies atmospheric physics and climate change applied to cultural heritage since many years.
Last suggestion: revise some typos such as:
. The modelled strain does not exceed the elastic limit for gesso (0.002), for the majority of eth data. (p. 4)
- There is a slight exceedance for a short period at the lowest RH, generatign a risk index of 0.08.(p. 4)
- there are a lot of "extra space" between words
- take a look to the references list because of the presence of extra lines and typos.
Author Response
please see attached file
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The new improved version integrates the corrections and reviewing proposals. The new version revised is acceptable for publication.
