Use of machinery and equipment designed for research purposes

Activities undertaken at university laboratories envisage the use of:

Equipment: any machine, apparatus, tool or plant used at work (art. 69 of Legislative Decree 81/08);
Machinery: devices with moving parts designed to produce power and work by transforming energy or to perform specific functions that would otherwise be carried out by humans (Zingarelli 2008); art. 2 of Legislative Decree 17/10 (transposing the Machinery Directive into Italian law) completes this definition with other possible sub-categories;
Machinery specially designed and constructed for research purposes: laboratory equipment specially designed and constructed for the needs of particular research projects (Guide to application of the Machinery Directive 2006/42/EC, question 60);
Prototypes: early versions, first models of a product from which other forms are developed (Treccani 2017); equipment built to represent a product or system, or a part thereof, that, even only to a limited extent, can be tested to carry out a preliminary assessment of the performance of a future evolution towards an end product (Pira and Patrucco, PoliTO – UniTO shared guidelines).