Prof. Gino Dini (Scientific coordinator for Leather Manipulation Project)

Ing. Michele Lanzetta (Scientific coordinator for Leather Quality Control Project)

Products made of natural leather are widely diffused in the everyday life of people. The production of finished leather plies is the first and, probably, the most critical phase of the entire process leading to the manufacturing of the final products (bags, shoes, etc.).

This phase can be divided into three steps, briefly described as follows:

• hide preparation: hundreds of pieces of raw hide come directly from the slaughtering. They are usually very dirty and covered by salt in order to avoid their putrefaction;
• tanning: this operation preserves the plies from bacterial attacks by appropriate chemical treatment using vegetable tannins, metallic sulfates and sulfurized phenol compounds. The leather become putrefaction resistant and can be used for a long time;
• finishing: the finishing step prepares the leather plies to further manufacturing processes. Their thickness is adjusted and gauged, the plies are then softened and stretched by special machines to reach the desired planarity and workability.

Nowadays, the previously mentioned processes usually present a very low level of automation. The reasons are multiple and can mainly be found in the intrinsic features of the product, as well as in a process practice deriving from a consolidated experience of work. Almost all the operations are performed on flexible, irregular, delicate, and often wet plies. Furthermore, the leather manufacturing is traditionally a craft procedure and the introduction of the automation meets a strong resistance 

Only single semi-automatic machines, able to perform specific operations on a single ply, are commonly used. The low level of automation goes to disadvantage of the global competitiveness of the trial and, furthermore, of the job conditions often unhealthy for the operators employees.

The aim of this project is the improvement of the efficiency and the safety of the treatment process of natural leathers through the automation of some production steps. 

This research project is divided in two branches:

• leather manipulation: research focused to leather manipulation systems for loading and unloading of finishing machines. These systems are mainly based on grasping plies by vacuum grippers 
• leather quality control: research focused to the development of a prototype of an inspection cell for detection of defects and classification of natural leather plies.

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Updated 2004/12/03