Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera

The CIM Institute at the Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera Italiana (SUPSI) has interdisciplinary skills and several years of experience in the transfer and application of innovative technology to the industrial sector. ICIMSI employs 30 persons of which the scientific staff numbers about 24 researchers.

The institute is part of a network of national and international centres that give practical, market-oriented support to small and medium sized enterprises.  ICIMSI’s support to innovation is centred on three main activities: R&D projects  - always carried out in close collaboration with industry and institutes of applied research - the BIT observatory for Business-Innovation-Technology survey, and the dissemination of new knowledge in programs for education and professional training. ICIMSI focuses its activities of applied research on Virtual prototyping and advanced materials, Development of design and control tools for the industrial automation, Production and Logistics Systems.

For the present project ICIMSI is coordinating the development of a fibrous 3D ceramic body as heat exchanger. On the experimental side ICIMSI is equipped with an extruder for thermoplastic compounding, an autoclave for fibre preforms shaping and cross-linking, a pyrolysis furnaces for ceramic conversion in inert atmosphere, and a high temperature furnace. ICIMSI has also a machine shop for models manufacturing and final part machining, a characterisation lab for mechanical, physical and morphological characterisation.

Side simulation work will be done on the base material properties and on thermo mechanical behaviour trough a solid mesh reconstruction from CT images of the heat exchanger materials and prototype. Software tools and skills are available to simulate material and component behaviour on a multi-scale level, from molecular dynamics to FEM.

Prof. Dr. Alberto Ortona graduated in naval and mechanical engineering at the University of Naples in 1989. He is professor at SUPSI and responsible of the composite and ceramic group at  ICIMSI. Prof. Ortona is active in process engineering and of: polymer composites, carbide ceramics and their composites. In the FP5 project BIOFLAM (# NNE5-2000-00246), Prof. Ortona was in charge of developing SiC ceramic foams for porous burners. Within the German national project CERPOR, together with the University of Erlangen, he studied long term Si-SiC ceramic foams oxidation. Prof Ortona has published circa 30 papers and 3 patents.

Prof. Dr. Andrea Danani obtained his PhD in Physics in 1992 and is now professor at SUPSI. Prof. Danani is leader of the simulation group in ICIMSI. He worked for many years in the field of superconductivity and surface diffusion and is active since 2002 in the field of nanotechnology, in particular about nano-structured material and nano-biomedicine, applying different simulation techniques.

Massimo Maiolo gained his bachelor on Computer Science engineering in 2007 at SUPSI. His thesis work was on the problematic of inclusion's morphology extrapolation from CT image data.  Within the ICIMSI' simulation group he is in charge of software tools development. Presently he is improving 3D mesh generation code from CT data.