Conflux Technology: a decade of LPBF heat exchanger development now feeding Airbus, Honeywell, and General Atomics aerospace programs

Conflux Technology, the Australian metal AM heat exchanger specialist founded in 2015 by former Formula One engineer Michael Fuller, says its decade-long bet on laser powder bed fusion is converting into deployed aerospace and defense hardware. CEO Dan Woodford told 3DPrint.com the company has worked with aerospace customers since 2018, including Airbus, Honeywell, and General Atomics, and has contributed to hydrogen aircraft programs such as Airbus's zero-emission initiatives and the EU-funded THEMEA4HERA thermal management program. Conflux already produces hundreds of additively manufactured heat exchangers annually, mostly for automotive customers, and is targeting production volumes in the thousands. To work around single-build size limits, it has developed modular designs joining two or more printed sections into one heat exchanger and has already deployed that approach in aviation test programs.

Woodford frames the change as AM shifting from experimental add-on to a deliberate design input from the start of aircraft development programs, with certification now the binding constraint rather than the printing step itself. That mirrors the qualification grind long associated with aerospace AM, best known from GE's 13-year LEAP fuel nozzle path, playing out as active engineering work at Conflux rather than a future hurdle. Advanced air mobility and drone programs are moving faster than commercial aircraft toward flight hardware volume because their certification bar is lower. Scaling, per Woodford, is less about adding printers than building a full production system: design for AM, repeatable manufacturing, depowdering, post-processing, inspection, and quality control.