Prof Works To Conserve Civil War Vessels

by Jim Raper

A team of scientists and conservators, including Desmond Cook, Old Dominion professor of physics, has high hopes for a new process developed to protect artifacts from the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor.

Experiments are being conducted utilizing “critical fluid” processes in pressurized chambers. Water and other fluids under high pressure, and sometimes high heat, are used to remove harmful chemicals from samples of iron and wood. Fluids in a chamber isolate or break down contaminants under conditions similar to those found in a typical kitchen pressure cooker.

“Critical fluid technology will revolutionize artifact conservation and then be accepted for many more corrosion-related issues,” Cook predicted. “Its future is as exciting as it can get if we can get the funding we need to develop this method.”

Cook, who for two decades has been a rust-buster working on troublesome rust problems affecting bridges and other steel structures, was the right man in the right place when The Mariners’ Museum in Newport News was chosen to be the home of the Monitor conservation effort.

“I feel fortunate that these artifacts came right here into my backyard,” he said, referring to the more than 1,000 pieces of the ironclad vessel and shipboard articles that have been recovered so far from the Monitor wreck site 16 miles off Cape Hatteras, N.C. Those pieces include the well-known turret, two massive guns and the vessel’s steam engine.

Cook’s role in the conservation of the Monitor was noted in a feature article, “Up from the Deep,” in the October issue of Materials Performance magazine.

“Through his work on the Monitor and other historical conservation projects, Cook hopes to develop new conservation techniques that will in turn lead to new information for the corrosion community” to use in protecting structures such as bridges, oil rigs and pipelines, the article states.

Little scientific research has been done on corrosion of wrought iron and cast iron, both of which are prominent in the makeup of the Monitor artifacts. With the Monitor project being hailed as the most important salvage effort ever of a sunken battleship, scientists and conservators are under a lot of pressure to design and implement a fail-safe conservation strategy, Cook said.

As it happened, the Monitor recovery effort over the last decade has coincided with a similar effort for another Civil War vessel, the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley. It is also constructed of wrought and cast iron and presents similar conservation challenges. The 40-foot Hunley, which sank at the entrance of the Charleston, S.C., harbor in 1864 and was raised in 2000, is at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center in Charleston.

Scientists from Clemson University took on the challenge of helping to conserve the Hunley and it was their innovation to employ critical fluid technology. Cook and colleagues at

Clemson have now combined their efforts in order to assist both conservation projects.

“My work with the Hunley project involves working with researchers from Clemson to develop and evaluate the critical fluid extraction process and facility,” Cook said. “This work is done in Charleston, but I do all the materials analysis, pre- and post-treatment, at ODU. The analytical techniques I use have been developed from my work involving steel bridge corrosion evaluation due to marine and de-icing salt exposure.”

Cook said his goal is eventually to have critical fluid technology facilities at ODU’s Applied Research Center in Newport News, allowing extraction experiments as well as analysis with sophisticated spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction and electron microprobes to be done under one roof.

The Mariners’ Museum will open its $30 million USS Monitor Center in March 2007. Its attractions will include some conserved artifacts, but most of the recovered material will be on view only in the conservators’ water tanks. The center, however, does feature a replica of the Monitor that visitors will be able to tour.

Cook said that even under the best-case scenario, the conservation of artifacts already recovered could take a decade or so. The most difficult conservation job will involve the Monitor’s steam engine, which is made of several different metals.