A little chat with Ernesto Consiglio
Hello Ernesto, tell us something about yourself …
I am quite a private person and I don’t like to tell myself very much. I can say that I was born in Taranto in 1963 but I have lived near Milan for many years, where I feel at home.
What led you to LSI LASTEM?
The path that led me to LSI LASTEM was unexpectedly lucky. From the age of 9-10 I have always had a passion for electronics and technology, and I built electronic circuits at home such as radios, oscillators, turntables, etc … taking the pieces from other objects that I disassembled. I remember that, always as a kid, I dreamed one day of going to Milan, where my grandmother already lived, because in my opinion Milan could offer many opportunities for a job in the technical-electronic field.
After the military service in Bergamo, at the age of 24, I moved to Milan, having obtained a scientific high school diploma. One day I replied to a job offer from LSI LASTEM and I went to the interview bringing some electronic circuits built by me, I remember that Mr. Luciano Certo, founder of LSI LASTEM, greatly appreciated my initiative and told me “Finally, we were looking for an experimenter!”.
I was hired and started working on sensor development and construction techniques. Among the most important ones I remember the research of the method to be able to build hot wire anemometers that require the “welding” of a very thin platinum or tungsten wire with a diameter of less than 10 µm, as well as the development of a thermopile sensor, for solar measurements, which contains about 1000 thermocouples in a disk with a diameter of 1.5 cm.
As Head of the Company’s Calibration and Certification Laboratories, what are the major responsibilities you face?
The management activity of the Accredia accredited laboratory LAT 205 (ISO 17025) is certainly demanding, both for the daily calibration activity and for the rather complex metrological confirmation activity, which requires the continuous control and periodic updating of the calibration of the instrumentation used.
The LSI LASTEM calibration laboratory is Accredia certified (ISO 17025) for temperature and air velocity measurements and ISO 9001 for other quantities such as solar radiation, illuminance, gas concentration measurements, atmospheric pressure and rain. Also in this case, the traceability and updating of the calibration of the laboratory reference instruments must be guaranteed.
My work ethic is based on transparency: it is essential that the measurements of the instruments calibrated in the laboratory, whose data are declared on the Certificates, are always verifiable also by other laboratories and by end users.
What do you like about LSI LASTEM and your job?
LSI LASTEM puts a lot of energy into the continuous improvement of the organization and calibration laboratories, for example thanks to the annual checks by Accredia which, at each inspection visit, checks the entire organization of the laboratory.
The objectives that I achieved thanks to my work and that gave me great satisfaction were certainly the collaboration in the development of sensors, which still happens today, the accreditation (ISO 17025) of the LAT 205 calibration laboratory for temperature in 2008 and for wind speed in 2016 and the University Degree in Physics at the University of Parma in 2014, as a working student, with a thesis on solar measuring instruments obviously produced by LSI LASTEM!