E-ROTORS: Sustainable Engineering and Digital Transition
The “Safe and Sustainable E-ROTORS” project, implemented under the Unite! Seed Fund for Teaching and Learning, has brought together 21 Unite! students and 25 Unite! teachers in Torino for two weeks of an intensive pilot course.
This pilot course, coordinated by Prof. Eugenio Brusa (Politecnico di Torino), was developed by a team of researchers and professors who established the “EU-Rotor Lab,” a federated research infrastructure connecting multiple research groups and laboratories within Unite! dealing with design of rotating systems. Two associate partners - the University of Loughborough (UK) and the University of Rijeka (Croatia) - also joined this initiative.
E-ROTORS introduced the fundamentals of modelling, design, testing, monitoring, and maintenance of rotating machinery and systems, and demonstrated the pragmatic implementation of design and modelling criteria, experimental tests, and data elaboration and interpretation. This was parallel to deepening knowledge of data processing and analysis, based on physical, statistical, AI approaches and therefore introduced the most updated enabling technologies of Industry 4.0 and 5.0, within the current stream of digital transition.
After the first stage, consisting of online webinars, between 13 and 24 April 2026, the students who joined the course were able to spend two weeks at Politecnico di Torino. They attended lectures, had guided visits to advanced labs in both the university and the private sector, and visited Turin’s museums.
This pilot course offered a novel opportunity for our masters’ students to learn how to ensure safety and reach the goal of full sustainability (within the actuation of green transition) though experimental activity, digital modelling, theoretical fundamentals data elaboration and analysis, even resorting to programming environments as Python and Matlab.