Vincenzo di Leo is 72 years old, he is a former worker from Brianza and some time ago he received a million dollar transfer: sender, Bill Gates. The tycoon focused his eyes on his creation, a special hydraulic pump that pushed the foundation he led to finance the project.
His story is told on the Corriere della Sera:
One day, those of the Bill Gates Foundation, the largest private foundation in the world with 50 billion of assets, arrive and they say to him: «Congratulations, your technology is truly unique, just what we need: sorry if we finance it a more development adapted to our needs? ». We would miss it.
Vincenzo di Leo’s “frabbrichetta” has 4 employees and is the only traditional Italian company on which the Bill Gates Foundation has decided to focus.
Vincenzo Di Leo explains how it works: the innovative feature is tolerance, that is, the ability to pass debris together with liquids. In practice, everything that passes through the suction pipe also passes through the pump body without blocking it; therefore no shredders or grids are needed. It consumes little and maintenance is easy.
The pump weighs 300 kilos, the request is to reduce it to 70. A challenge. Now there is the prototype, but the mission is not over yet.
«Going from 300 to 70 kg – says Di Leo – was not the only problem. Now we are on the home straight but we had to rethink everything and at first it seemed impossible: I sat in front of that car for six months to understand how to reduce all that weight. There is no such product in the world. It has a total passage, a tolerance that no other pump has. The only similar system is the self-purge, but the self-purge must stop and empty itself, instead we do it with a continuous system, using one fifth of the energy and arriving everywhere “.
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