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Occasionally in business a colleague, a customer or a supplier becomes a friend. Sometimes a close friend. For many of the team at Simpson Technologies such was the case with our relationship with Ricardo Gerosa. On Monday 22nd August our friend Ricardo Gerosa passed away at the age of 89 in Rosario, Argentina. He had a long and happy life, full of family, friends and work…so no regrets but we will still miss him a lot. Until the very last day in hospital he was speaking about work….engineering was his passion.
He was graduated as Chemical Engineer in the city of Santa Fe, Argentina. His first job was in a foundry that produced 30t per month and when he left it was producing 1,200t per month. He was a technical manager for FOSECO Argentina, manufacturing new products brought from England, and then worked in TANDIMAT, a foundry that made large scale screens. Following that, with a Meehanite do Brazil license he was an assessor to large foundries in Brazil, Chile and Peru. He started a family business – Ing. Ricardo Gerosa S.R.L. in Rosario, Argentina- to produce a newly developed line of innovative sand testing equipment for foundries and a full line of chemically bonded sand preparation and molding equipment. He gave many lectures to South American foundry industry events about the operation of a cupola and the control of foundry molding sand. More recently, he was founder of the foundry Small Castings SA, and continued producing castings and developing machines until the very last moment. In his last days he was still working on a project for a pneumatic sand squeezer that could communicate to a computer.
In 1992 Ricardo established contact with Simpson Technologies Corporation in Aurora, IL USA and Simpson began to sell Ricardo Gerosa S.R.L. produced equipment under the Simpson brand. The success of the technology and the growing demand for increased production prompted Simpson to acquire 100% of the technology for the sand testing equipment from Ricardo Gerosa S.R.L. in 1999. Ricardo Gerosa S.R.L. and the Gerosa family remain a key manufacturing and research partner to Simpson Technologies to this day. Products of the Simpson+Gerosa sand testing equipment product line have been sold to foundries, foundry material suppliers and research universities in more than 50 countries. In 2008 Simpson acquired the former +GF+/DISA sand testing equipment from DISA Industrie AG in Switzerland. The combined Gerosa and +GF+ product lines are now known as “Simpson Analytics” and is the clear world leader and standard in foundry sand testing technology.
The global foundry industry mourns the loss of a true leader, innovator and friend that has improved our work and personal life in so many ways. His work lives on in the thousands of foundries around the world who use his innovations every day. Rest in Peace Ricardo.
