Philippe Charlier, the forensic scientist behind the project, told AFP that his team would spend six months analysing relics said to be from her pyre, including bone fragments, human tissue and wood.
By studying the relics' biochemical and molecular makeup, they hope to precisely date and authenticate them but also perhaps to discover new facts about the French military heroine made a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.
A combination of carbon dating techniques and analysis of pollen traces will allow them to pinpoint the relics' age down to the exact year and month.
"We will be able to say: these are the remains of a woman who died in Rouen in northern France, aged 19, who died in 1431 around May 30, and who was burned three times in the same day," Charlier said.
If all of the above can be confirmed, he said, "we will know with near certainty that this is indeed Joan of Arc".
Born to a humble home in eastern France but inspired by what she believed to be divine voices, Joan of Arc (1412-1431) helped France to wrest the advantage back from England towards the end of the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453).
Wounded in battle, she was captured and sold to the English, to be convicted of heresy and burned at the stake.
Joan of Arc's extraordinary destiny has been a source of fascination to French writers from Voltaire to the present day, who have recreated the Maid of Orleans, as she was known, as everything from a saint to the victim of a sinister Church plot.
Her claim to divine inspiration, and success in repulsing the English invader, made her a potent symbol of the emergence of the French nation.
She later became a mythical inspiration for France's Catholic nationalists and has been controversially adopted as the emblem of Jean-Marie Le Pen's far-right National Front party, which celebrates her memory every year.
Charlier said however that he was driven purely by scientific curiosity and was unaffected by the tug-of-war over Joan of Arc's legacy.
"There is no nationalist goal behind this, no religious or political angle-- it is just a scientific and historical investigation," he said.
Joan of Arc's ashes -- preciously guarded by a French historical association and currently the property of the Roman Catholic Church authorities in Tours, southwest of Paris -- are the only remaining traces of her.
"In reality, we know hardly anything of Joan of Arc. We do not even have a drawing of her -- except an outline sketched at the bottom of a legal document," Charlier told Le Parisien newspaper.
"Even the armour attributed to her is actually largely posthumous."
Initially a figurehead who revealed herself as a true military leader, Joan of Arc led the French armies in lifting the English siege of Orleans in 1429, the first of a chain of swift victories that ended with the French dauphin's coronation as Charles VII.
She was rehabilitated by the Catholic Church a quarter-century after her death, and canonised in 1920.