Quantitative Study of Ancient Glass Weathering Based on Chemical Component Characteristics

Abstract

Ancient glass artifacts have deteriorated in composition due to long-term weathering, and studying their chemical characteristics and causes of weathering is of great significance to the conservation of cultural relics. Specifically, this study takes high-potassium glass and lead-barium glass along the Silk Road as the research object. It explores the weathering characteristics and compositional change rules of the glass through the methods of data cleaning, descriptive statistics, and regression analysis. It was found that the average value of silica content of high-potassium glass was 63.91% before weathering, and increased to 93.96% after weathering. In contrast, the average value of silica content of lead-barium glass was 53.19% before weathering and decreased to 34.63% after weathering. Multiple linear regression analysis revealed the significant weights of key components such as silica and alumina on the effect of glass weathering. Meanwhile, the mean square error between the chemical composition data before weathering predicted using the regression model and the actual measured values is less than 5%, which further verifies the stability and accuracy of the model.