Proposal of a new analytical procedure for the measurement of water absorption by stone. Preliminary study for an alternative to the Italian technical normative NORMAL 07-81

Background: Italian technical normative in the field of cultural heritage is often considered insufficient or not suitable in practise, therefore efforts are necessary to design new and/or improve already existing ones. Results: In this paper an alternative analytical procedure for the determination of water absorption (by full immersion) by stone material, described in the NORMAL 07-81 document, is proposed. Improvements concern methods accuracy and reduction of sample size; further also density data is obtained. Conclusions: The new procedure was applied on three different marble samples and outcomes are encouraging, but further testing is running to better understand to what extent sample size can be reduced without worsening accuracy of results, taking into account that stone is a very heterogeneous material.