In Padua, in the beating heart of the Veneto region, a land historically populated by small entrepreneurs/inventors, in an industrial district seemingly similar to many others, there is a company capable of designing and building plants that exist nowhere else in the world. It is called DMA and is led by engineer De Marchi, an atypical and charismatic figure, used to thinking outside the box. His field of action? Industrial furnaces.
But not standardised ones, nor mass-produced ones: DMA makes unique machines – prototypes born from specific needs – often visionary, requiring technical courage, inventiveness and determination to go beyond the limits of the market. Furnaces that are not copied: they are invented.
PROJECTS LIKE NO OTHER
In the high-end nautical sector DMA marked a turning point by designing a special furnace for the chemical glass tempering that processes sheets up to 8 m long for the Paduan Viraver.
In 2022, the company reached a new milestone with a plant capable of processing sheets up to 10 m in length: a technological revolution born in collaboration with the international player Isoclima Group, that has leveraged these production capabilities within a technological offering, combining aesthetics, performance, and safety. These plants, according to De Marchi himself, represent an absolute novelty in terms of size and mode of operation.
“There are no other furnaces in the world capable of processing sheets of glass up to 10 m with this type of process,” he says, “and we had to reinvent everything to make them. This has given the designers of the best shipyards in the world the opportunity to design windows using fewer metal uprights and to give more and more continuity to the glass, making their creations true works of art where the border of transparency can stretch further and further towards the sky or the sea”.
With this approach, DMA is now recognised as a key partner for yacht glass solutions at the highest level.
Chemically tempering glass does not mean heating and cooling it, as happens in thermal tempering. The process is completely different and much more costly: it involves immersing the sheet of glass in a tank containing molten salts (typically potassium nitrate) at around 450°C. The ionic exchange between the Sodium present in the glass and the molten Potassium generates surface tension that drastically increases the mechanical resistance.
The result: a glass that is harder, less thick and optically more transparent than thermally toughened glass. But this process, which is already complex on small panes, becomes a colossal engineering challenge when we are talking about panes that are 8 or even 10 m long.
The tanks must contain hundreds of tonnes of molten salt – up to 220 tonnes in the case of the largest plant – and maintain a temperature uniform to the degree over the entire volume.
“In glass you cannot have temperature differences of more than 10°C between one point and another, otherwise it breaks. And on these volumes, maintaining that uniformity is almost impossible. Yet we managed it. And all this is thanks to a group of exceptional collaborators who, from the design to the installation, make every dream come true and really take shape”.
INDUSTRIAL TAILORS
DMA is not a large industrial company. It is a team of people with uncommon determination, with a network of external collaborators and first-class local suppliers.
“We have no standard models. Every plant is a first. When customers come in, they don’t tell us what shape the furnace should be, but what it should do, and we imagine it from scratch. We are industrial tailors, or perhaps craftsmen of the impossible”. The responsibility and the stakes are very high. We are talking about bespoke engineering projects worth millions of euros, which require months of planning, weeks of assembly and days of testing.
“To install the 10-m furnace, for example, we had to uncover the whole shed. The work was truly complex and required the involvement and active participation of all of us and the building’s designers.
What if, after all this, they don’t work? I have heard that, unfortunately, it can happen. In Germany a company threw away a similar plant because they couldn’t make it work. However, we have never failed so far. But it takes a good dose of healthy recklessness to take on jobs like that”.
With its advanced marine glazing systems and record-breaking chemical tempering capabilities, DMA is defining a new frontier in glass technology for superyachts, a field where aesthetics, engineering and ambition collide.
