Profile

Originally from the sunny Italy, I moved to the rainy Limerick more than 10 years ago for my PhD. After falling in love with the city and with Ireland, I decided to stay and work as a researcher (first) in the School of Engineering of the University of Limerick.

I like to be active and I cycle to work every day (also under the rain!) and I play tennis or squash in the evenings. During weekends I really enjoy going for long drives on the west coast with my husband.

My two biggest passions are skiing in winter and scuba diving in summer…. they sound quite different but they have a similarity…. water (or H2O) is involved in both!

I have been skiing since I was 3 years old and I love it so much that the first thing I actually checked before moving to Ireland was if there were ski slopes!!!!!

I love scuba diving because you can explore the wonderful underwater world around us. It took me a good bit of  courage to dive in the freezing Atlantic ocean but it was unbelievable: my favorite dive was actually diving with seals here in Ireland!

My two research areas are vibrational energy harvesting (the conversion of ambient vibrations into electricity) and cooling of electronics. The two topics seem quite different but electromagnetic induction (magnet moving relatively to a coil) is the common physical principle that I am using.

The device that convert vibrations into electricity is called vibrational energy harvester or VEH. My dream would be to realise a vibrational energy harvester that could power small sensors or electronic devices without the use of any battery. Batteries are dangerous for the environment if not properly discarded and recycled and with my work I ultimately would love to reduce ambient pollution.

For cooling electronics of space satellites! I use a special fluid that when boils can extract a lot of heat (so it is very good a cooling!). The fluid however has to circulate in a loop and one of the main components is the pump. I have designed a novel type of pump that works with magnets and coils (that’s where the magnetic induction comes in) that can work at very high internal pressures (that the special fluid requires) and is very reliable. The reliability of of the pump is critical for space applications as replacing the pumps is not easy!

As part of my job I design, simulate (lots of Maths and programming) and test vibrational energy harvesters, pumps and cooling systems. I also have to build my experimental setups for testing my devices and this is at time quite challenging but rewarding!

I wake up at  8am and after a good breakfast, I cycle to work. My working day generally start with checking emails (so boring!) and then…my days are never the same!

I could spend the day writing codes to model my devices to predict how they will behave, or I could spend the day trying to assemble all the components or (worse) winding coils. Most of the time I am though in the lab testing.

I  have lunch (and more important coffee) with friends and after lunch I go back to my simulations or to my lab to finish off what I started in the morning.

During the teaching semesters, I have classes and I always try to bring examples of my research or of real world objects to my students so that they can see better how what they study is important.

In research, days are never the same and there are always unexpected events that happens, experiments not going as planned, but this is the fun part and often the most important results are the ones we did not  planned.

I would like to build a demonstrator of vibrational energy harvesting that could be shown to school students to science week or similar events. I would like to build a vibrational energy harvester that could be easily shaked by hand and it could generate enough energy to power LEDs or a temperature sensor that transmit data to a phone via Bluetooth.

The LEDs are an easy way to show that by using vibrations (in this case by shaking the VEH) it is possible to generate electricity.

The temperature sensor will then show a real application and it will be used to show the general public that it is possible to power sustainably small sensors without using batteries, by exploiting vibrations.