About Additive Manufacturing

What is Additive Manufacturing?

Additive Manufacturing (AM) enables shapes and forms that are not possible with traditional manufacturing.

Traditional manufacturing relies on subtractive processes (creating parts by removing or cutting away from a solid block of material) and/or joining many simple components together. AM is an additive process, where parts are built incrementally, one layer at a time, and often as a single piece rather than many.

There are profound implications of this development and the resulting complex geometries that can now be made, but contrary to popular belief it is not possible to print anything and everything. Conflux prides itself on pushing the limits of what AM can do. Our focus is inch wide, mile deep: AM heat exchangers.

As with any new technology, AM demands specialists with a suite of skillsets who that go beyond previous practices and focus on this new territory and its intricacies. Our team creates detailed geometries that cannot be manufactured using any other method, nor by any other AM team.

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Heat exchanger performance improvements enabled by metal 3D Printing:

Higher Thermal Exchange
Enhanced surface area density to volume ratio results in high thermal exchange performance.

Reduced Weight
Monolithic structures result in significant weight reductions.

Reduced Size
Higher thermal performance and monolithic parts translate to step changes in part size

Low Pressure Drop
Optimised flow design reduces pressure drop and improves system efficiency.

Morphed Topology
Design freedom gives flexibility in form factor; geometry can be morphed to the fit the space available.

Other benefits of AM

Heat exchangers produced via AM offer potential benefits for wide ranging industries and applications:

Reduced BOM - monolithic forms lead to reduction of parts
Lower waste - as material is added and not cut away
Simplified manufacturing processes - one machine can manufacture many parts
Reduction in lead times - rapid prototyping in the design phase, no retooling during production
Reduction in inventory - print parts on demand
Localised manufacturing - print on site or at a skilled service bureau

Partner with experts who live and breath AM

Conflux Technology are known industry wide as the pioneers of AM heat exchange technology. Our specialist knowledge of thermo fluid dynamics engineering is combined with more than 20 years’ experience and success in metal AM – from design and CFD analysis through to in-house AM production, post-processing and independent validation.

We’ve developed a vertically integrated business with experts at each step of the way incorporating powerful and unique capabilities like our use of the Australian Synchotron, our inhouse quality control software Conflux Quantify or our vast library of proprietary parameters. Partner with us and harness the benefits of our experience for your own gain.

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Example applications by industry

Aerospace
Pre-coolers
Charge air coolers
Fuel and oil heat exchangers

Automotive and motorsports
Oil/water cooler
Water charge air coolers
EV inverter cooler

Defence
LRU Electronic box cooler
Oil cooler
Hydraulics cooler

Microelectronics
Phase change coolers
On-chip cooler
Immersion coolers

Oil and gas
Modular arrays for large scale heat exchange
Fuel and oil coolers

Energy
Multi-mega watt modular arrays
Molten salt/sodium
Hydrogen liquification

“The Conflux team has impressively demonstrated how well it understands metal AM technology. Complex structures in challenging environments require not only the highest standard of machine technology to produce parts, but also the best engineering skills to design the right products.”

Arno Held, Chief Venture Officer, AM Ventures