This is the title of the thesis Alberto Alcesti wrote for his degree in Mechatronic Engineering at the University of Padua.
And these pages contain a bit of IFP Europe technology. The thesis took shape in the Vicenza area, at the Montecchio Maggiore plant of Xylem Lowara, a multinational that manufactures pumps and circulators for clean water and wastewater in the construction, industrial and agricultural sectors. It was the two washing systems IFP Europe designed and built for the company that inspired the future engineer. One of them is a KP HYBRID 800.
“It was the topic I chose for my thesis that brought me to Lowara,” says Alberto. “Here I had the chance to do an internship to prepare for the last mile of my degree. I had great support from Luca Gamba, Plant Efficiency Manager, who guided me along the way and whom I’d like to thank very much. I needed to work with advanced, sustainable technology, and I found it here, including in the two IFP Europe systems. As the title suggests, RFID stands for radio frequency identification, a technology based on the propagation of electromagnetic waves. It enables the automatic, remote reading of data stored in dedicated memory chips, providing unique identification. Essentially, by attaching these small tags to a specific process component, the reader captures the object’s characteristics in order to catalog it and identify the process it needs to go through. This effectively marks the shift from the traditional sheet of paper attached to an object to describe its characteristics to a digital system.”
What did you take away from IFP Europe’s technology?
“My thesis has an introductory section covering the general context, followed by a description of my project, which uses RFID technology to read the tags attached to the bins holding components headed for the washing process. The selection of the washing program has also been automated. In my work, I describe a production process involving several machines, and in these 80 pages I had to include a cutting-edge, technologically advanced system. The digitalization process mainly involves two machines. The first is a mechanical press that produces stamped components, which are then fed into the IFP Europe system to be degreased and prepared for the next stages.”
“The technological appeal of IFP machines is very strong. I compared vacuum technology with conventional tunnel washers. What’s interesting is the water savings and the sustainability of the cleaning process. In the section on RFID-enabled bins, I emphasized the importance of software integration in my project and highlighted its key aspects.
Beyond my thesis, I’m convinced that sustainability in companies and production processes should be a path everyone follows, far more than a passing trend. That does require investment, though, which is no small item in a company budget. Tunnel washing wastes a lot of water, while an IFP system in action means less water waste, less use of solvents and cleaning products, limited energy consumption and a closed chamber that keeps the operator as far as possible from the degreasing area: sustainability and safety… In a word: eco-friendly!”