Air curtains as a protection for indoor cultural heritage: a proposal for Michelangelo’s David in Florence

The employment of air curtain to segregate pollutants diffusion near the sources for fire prevention is actually more and more diffused in industry buildings. Their success is due to the peculiarity to compart spaces without fixed barriers which should interfere with people and equipments. The application of air flows in museum deals with the problem to separate visitors and objects in order to protect the latter from pollutants. When the device is installed near the object to protect, this represents a “direct protection method”, and a proposal of this kind of system is on to go in the HVAC and air distribution system retrofitting of the Galleria dell’Accademia in Firenze where Michelangelo’s David and other masterpieces are placed in. CFD characterisation of the two case-studies, before and after the proposal, are reported.