Within academic laboratories, activities are carried out that involve the use of:
- Equipment: any machine, device, tool, or system intended to be used during work (art. 69 D.Lgs. 81/08);
- Machines: devices with moving parts capable of producing power and work through energy transformation or performing specific functions otherwise carried out by humans (Zingarelli 2008); art. 2 of D.Lgs. 17/10 (Italian implementation of the Machinery Directive) completes this definition with other possible sub-cases;
- Equipment specifically designed and built for research purposes: laboratory equipment specifically designed and built to meet the needs of particular research projects (Guidance on the application of Dir. 2006/42/EC, question 60);
- Prototypes: first samples, original models of a series of subsequent realizations (Treccani 2017); equipment constituting a representation of a product or system, or part of it, which, even if somewhat limited, can be tested for preliminary evaluation purposes on the performance of a future evolution into a finished product (Pira and Patrucco, Shared PoliTo – UniTo Guidelines).
For more information, refer to the materials of the Specific Training Course for medium risk.