University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (UniMORE)

UNIMORE (1176) is third oldest University in the world, and has always been ranked among the first Italian universities for quality of teaching and research since 2007. UNIMORE is a networked campus located in the towns of Modena and Reggio Emilia. It counts about 20000 students, including 3500 postgraduates, 900 faculty members, 8 PhD schools. UNIMORE has over 300 international exchange agreements and cooperation programs to encourage students and researcher to actively interact in a globalized world. The University has a strategic commitment to promote research in the following major areas: Mechanics and Mechatronics, Logistics, Molecular and Regenerative Medicine, Nanoscience and Nanotechnology,  ICT and Neuroscience.

Italy

UNIMORE has excellent international network including academic and industrial players. The University project portfolio comprises more than 50 running FP7 projects, plus several projects financed by the NIH and by the ARTEMIS and ENIAC Joint Technology Initiatives. UNIMORE is part of the High Technology Regional Cluster, involving all the Universities in the Emilia-Romagna Region, and offers cutting-edge facilities for technology transfer in the sectors of regenerative medicine, advanced materials, mechanical engineering, mechatronics, ICT in business applications.
Research Office provides RTD advisory, project management services, training and capacity building in transferable skills supporting the building of transnational collaborative projects and industry-academia partnerships. A dedicated Industrial Liaison Office supports spin-off and provides IPR tech-transfer advisory.

At UNIMORE research is conducted both at the 14 Departments and research centers, the latter may involve multiple departments in the development of interdisciplinary research activities. The Department in charge of the local implementation of MiLEDI is the Department of Sciences and Methods for Engineering (DISMI). The administrative and management staff of DISMI is currently involved in managing several EU projects, the most important are: INCLUSIVE, AEOLIX, NEMO, CONNECARE, DREAM.

The laser treatments will be executed by means of picosecond laser granted to the project by partner Ekspla. UniMORE will provide the movement systems while specific optical devices like scanner heads and focusing system for higher harmonics and beam shaping device will be co-founded by the project itself.
Local materials characterization will be performed by using state of the art instruments facilities of the central interdepartmental laboratory of UNIMORE (www.cigs.unimore.it) equipped with an overall 6.5 million € distributed between SEM, EDS/X, XRD, FIB, AFM and NRM, a 1.2 M€ TEM system will be implemented in 2018.

Is currently Associate Professor in Manufacturing Engineering at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. He graduated in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Bologna in 1993. In 1998 He obtained the PhD degree in Mechanics of the Materials at the University of Pisa. In the following three years of post-doctoral positions at the University of Bologna he worked in the field of fracture mechanics and fatigue thresholds of metal alloys. In 2001 he became Research Associate in Manufacturing Engineering at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Since 2004 his main field of research is laser based manufacturing, mainly ablation, surface laser treatments and laser micro manufacturing. In the last three years, he focused his attention in the use of ultrafast lasers for the surface nano texturing and the generation of Laser-Induced Periodic Surface Structures (LIPSS) for industrial applications.

Is a fourth-year PhD student at DISMI, he has been currently submitted his PhD thesis titled “Highly-regular laser-induced periodic surface structures: mechanisms, methods and Applications” to the doctoral commission. He acquired many experiences in the generation of LIPSS on several kinds of materials. He spent 9 months between Bilkent University in Ankara (TK), working at the Ultrafast Optics and Lasers Laboratory or UFOLAB where he obtained several advances in Nonlinear Laser Lithography technique, at Lisbon Polytechnic Institute, acquiring skills in the dynamic wettability measurements, 3 months modelling LIPSS phenomena at HILASE and 1 month at Bochum Rhur University working on femtosecond laser treatment on sapphire. He obtained Master Degree at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute in 2012, defending a Thesys “Surface Modification of Vacuum-Arc condensates of Ti/Fe, Ti/Mg, and Nickel alloy from SDP-2 using lasers” working at Frantsevich Institute for Problems of Materials Science NASU (National Academy of Science of Ukraine).

He is a postdoc researcher at DISMI. He got the Master Degree in Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in 2011; during his PhD, his research was in the field of Machine Diagnostics; in 2016 he got the PhD in “Industrial Innovation Engineering” with a Thesis titled “From Vibration Mechanics to a Sensorless Approach for Machine Diagnostics”, where he studied the possibility of perform machine diagnostics without using dedicated (extra) sensors. He is currently working on the development of innovative software for Laser treatment of complex surfaces, in collaboration with SISMA s.p.a.. He is mainly dealing with the automatic generation of laser instructions for Laser Texturing of complex (3D freeform) surfaces, with the main aims of reducing the computation time while improving the quality of the treatment. He is also involved in the development of software for the generation of images that contain “Natural” / non-regular patterns or textures, starting from a sample image of the pattern to be reproduced (“Texture Synthesis by example”)

Barbara Reggiani is part of the group of “Manufacturing technologies and systems” as senior researcher at the Department of Sciences and Methods for Engineering (DISMI) in Reggio Emilia since 2017. She got the Master Degree in Management Engineering at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in 2003. Afterwards, she attained the PhD in “Mechanics of Materials and technological processes” at the DIN Department of the University of Bologna in 2007 with a thesis entitled “Simulation models in Biomechanics and Experimental Mechanics”. Specifically, the research was focused on the development of numerical and analytical models to be used at the design stage of components and processes. Currently, the main field of research concern the experimental monitoring and the numerical modelling of manufacturing systems, especially of plastic deformation processes.
The goal is the development of automated optimization procedures able to solve conflicting functional requirements facing with the global processes complexity. She is also working on innovative applications of surface treatments (shot peening, rolling, laser hardening,..) to small components with the aim to increase their in-service performances.

One more Post-Doc figure will be hired inside the project

I. Gnilitskyi, V. Gruzdev, N. M. Bulgakova, T. Mocek and L. Orazi, Mechanisms of high-regularity periodic structuring of silicon surface by sub-MHz repetition rate ultrashort laser pulses, Applied Physics Letters 109(14), 143101, 2016

I. Gnilitskyi, M. Pogorielov, D. Dobrota, R. Viter, L. Orazi, and O. Mischenko, Cell and Tissue Response to Modified by Laser-induced Periodic Surface Structures Biocompatible Materials for Dental Implants, in Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (2016), paper AW4O.6, 2016

L. Orazi, I. Gnilitskyi, I. Pavlov, A.P. Serro, S. Ilday and F. Ö. Ilday, Nonlinear Laser Lithography to control surface properties of stainless steel. CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology, vol. 64/1, 2015

G. Rotella, L. Orazi, M. Alfano, S. Candamano, I. Gnilitskyi, 2017. Innovative high-speed femtosecond laser nano-patterning for improved adhesive bonding of Ti6Al4V titanium alloy. CIRP Journal of Manufacturing Science and Technology. doi:10.1016/j.cirpj.2016.10.003

L. Orazi, I. Gnilitskyi, A.P. Serro, 2017. Laser Nanopatterning for Wettability Applications. J. Micro Nano-Manuf 5, 021008-021008-8. doi:10.1115/1.4035956

[1] Industrial Project for SISMA S.p.A. - “Development of advanced functions for laser texturing”. 15/01/2016 - 14/01/2017