Sometimes you leave the tap running by mistake; sometimes you were running a bath and got an emergency, and you leave it running; another example is that you experience the worst storm in years and you cannot be able to stop the water from getting into your house. All these situations present with the same predicament – a flooded house. A flooded house is a disaster. The water spreads all over the house, to all rooms if no one catches the leak on time and this means that you will need to make sure that you salvage all that you can. Items such as important document and painting that have been damaged by water can be restored by using lyophilisation.
Lyohilisation is the process of freeze-drying items that are destroyed or damaged by moisture or water with an aim of improving their condition or restoring them to their previous form. This process of freeze-drying includes several procedures, these are; pretreatment of the items, freezing, initial drying and final drying.
- Pretreatment
In this step, the damaged items are soaked into a solution that makes the item stable and recover from the adverse effects of water damage. The items are put into a freeze concentration to hold the broken segments together and make it easy to move the item around during the process. There are several methods of doing this and they include soaking the item in solution phase formulae, preparation to steady reactive products, to widen the surface and decreasing pressure of the high vapor solvents.
- Freezing
After the first process is done, you need to take the item to the laboratory where it is put into a drying flask that is them put into a freezer and them it is frozen using liquid nitrogen (please do not try this if you are not a professional). The item is then dried to its lowest point preferably three times lower than its freezing point.
- Initial drying
This stage sees the item put in a chamber where the pressure is reduced and heat is applied to remove the water or rather make it sublime using the items latent heat of sublimation. Here almost all the water is removed from the item.
- Final drying
Here, all the remaining water is removed leaving the item dry and reclaimed from water damage. These processes require an expert and should not be taken up as a DIY project unless you have the training and equipment needed.