Award-winning interdisciplinary research between manufacturing and data

Four awards to Bianca Maria Colosimo who has been working with her team in this area for years

The Industry 4.0 paradigm has highlighted the possibility of charting a new direction for the future of digital and sustainable manufacturing.

Additive manufacturing - also known as 3D printing - allows us to produce a new generation of 'green' products: lighter, highly efficient, with lower material consumption and extended service life. At the same time, new sensors allow a large amount of data, such as signals, images and videos, to be obtained in real time. When properly analysed, this data makes machines smarter, i.e., able to detect their own status, detect defects and adapt to abnormal conditions during the printing process, thus minimising the waste of resources.

Bianca Maria Colosimo, professor at the Department of Mechanics, has been developing for several years, together with her team, an interdisciplinary research on the borderline between additive manufacturing and big data analysis, aimed at seizing the great opportunities this challenge offers for sustainable manufacturing.

For this research activity, she received four international awards in the past year.

Two awards are in the area of manufacturing, and were given by the European Welding Foundation (EWF) in Lisbon, in November 2022 (Honorary Certificate of International Expert in Additive Processes) and by the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences - The Jacob Wallenbergs Foundation in Gothenburg, in August 2023 (Award for research in science of materials for zero-waste solutions).

The other two awards originate in the field of statistical data analysis, and were given by the American Society for Quality(ASQ Brumbaugh Award, for the scientific article that made the greatest contribution to the industrial application of statistical quality control methods in the last year) and the European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics.

In particular, the latter is the prestigious George Box Medal Award, which is given annually to a researcher who in his or her career has made a significant contribution to the development and application of industrial statistics. In particular, Colosimo is the first Italian and the second woman to receive this international award.