Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - National Institute of Laser Enhanced Science - Department of Laser Application in Enviromental Metrology Photochemistry and Agriculture

The investigation of the chemical composition, surface structure, corrosion mechanism and coating techniques of bronze archaeological artifacts from Romans and pre-Romans times aimed to produce similar modern reference alloys.These reference alloys will be used as sacrificial materials in deep study of appropriate conservation and restoration treatments.In the present work, Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) is introduced as a new validated surface mapping technique to study the micro-chemical distribution of elements in two groups of binary reference copper-based alloy samples; copper-silver and copper-nickel. Using different analytical surface and bulk techniques such as Optical Microscopy (OM), Scanning Electron Microscopy coupled with Energy Dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-EDS) and X-ray Diffraction (XRD), it has been proven that LIBS is a simple, sensitive and direct technique in the determination of homogeneity or heterogeneity of the sample{u2019}s surface. As known, LIBS is based on the analysis of the emission obtained from the plasma plume

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