Provides Metalmeccanica

Global overview

Provides Metalmeccanica Srl (Provides Srl abbreviated) is an SME founded in 1968 in Latina, Italy. It is a privately owned company with 600,000 Euros of paid-up capital. Since the foundation of the company, Provides Srl has produced many different types of products showing its flexibility in this field. The products ranged from metallic office equipment, to aluminium racks for telephonic companies, LPG tanks for both domestic and automotive use. In all fields, Provides Srl was a leader and in 1990, Provides Srl decided to move towards a much more technological product and hence entered the field of Shell and Tube Heat Exchangers for the HVAC and Refrigeration Industry. Since then, Provides Srl has become the largest private Shell and Tube manufacturer in Europe and possibly in the world.

Provides Srl has over the years expanded its production sites to cover the globe.

From the Italian Headquarters, Provides Srl expanded into China in 2005 (the site is located in Chengdu, in the Sichuan Province) and in 2015, we set up another manufacturing site in Verona, Virginia USA. Total production space of the Provides Srl Group is approx 24,000 sqr meters (10,000 in Italy, 8,500 in the USA and 5,500 in China). The total turnover of the Provides Group in 2016 was approx 40 million Euros with 65% of the turnover produced in the Italian Headquarters.

Why Provides Srl

Provides Srl is today the world supplier of Shell and Tube Heat Exchangers for Daikin Industries. Amongst our customer list, we can boast of other global companies such as Emerson, Bosch, Schneider Electric, Mitsubishi to name a few. The reason for our success is our constant strive to innovate and research new technologies. Provides Srl does not simply utilize standard products found commercially on the market – we therefore collaborate with our most important suppliers (such as our copper tube supplier for example, but not only) to personalise products to better suit our needs. This continues to allow us to be leaders and innovators in our field. Provides Srl introduced the Single Pass Dry Expansion Evaporators into the industry thus setting the new standard of “High Efficiency” in that field, we also introduced the Compact Spray Flooded Evaporator into the Industry setting again new standards for “Low Refrigerant Content” which is very important today in the Environmental picture on the globe. Recently we have been involved in the “Power Electronics Cooling” sector which has allowed us, through constant collaboration with experts such as Prof. John Thome, to introduce efficiencies in this field which have never been contemplated up until now.

Provides Srl has invested approx 2 – 3% of its Italian annual turnover every year in research – this has allowed us to have a production area dedicated especially for research in order to be independent of production commitments towards our customers. It has also allowed us to set up a thermal test bench up to 450 kW (cooling capacity with R134a refrigerant), shown in Figure 1. A second thermal test bench which can test up to 1000 kW (cooling capacity with R134a or R1234ze refrigerants in an oil free environment) is being currently built and will be ready within the first quarter of 2018, depicted in Figure 2. We have also recently invested in a specialized high precision laboratory (cf. Figure 3) where we can perform single tube tests both in Pool Boiling and in Flow Boiling as well as single tube Condensation tests. This type of experimental capability has put Provides Srl in a unique position compared to its direct competitors, none of which have such facilities or capabilities.

In the last 6 years, Provides Srl has been collaborating with Prof. John Thome in projects involving “electronics cooling”. There are a number of prototypes around the globe which are in various phases of testing, many of which involve extremely important companies such as Nokia Bell, IBM, Yahoo and others.

Its website is https://www.provides.it.