The metal additive manufacturing industry has spent years talking about "scaling" as if it were a switch to flip. In a July 27 interview published on 3DPrint.com, Conflux Technology CEO Dan Woodford makes the case that the industry has finally moved past that hype cycle into a harder, less glamorous phase: actually building the production systems needed to make thousands of flight-qualified parts a year, not just a few hundred.

Conflux, an Australian manufacturer founded in 2015 by Michael Fuller, makes metal 3D-printed heat exchangers — the compact, highly complex components that manage thermal loads in aircraft, hypersonic vehicles, motorsport, and defense systems. Fuller spent years working in Formula One before launching the company. According to Woodford, Conflux currently produces hundreds of these units annually for customers outside aerospace, primarily in automotive applications, and is working toward an output measured in the thousands. That jump, he argues, is not a matter of simply installing more laser powder bed fusion machines on the shop floor. As Woodford put it, "You need the right designs, the ability to manufacture consistently, depowdering, post-processing, inspection, and quality systems" — an entire production chain re-engineered around repeatable post-processing, qualified supply chains, inspection regimes that can keep pace with volume, and design choices made with manufacturability in mind from the start.

The Modular Approach to Complex Geometry

One of the specific technical strategies Woodford points to is a modular, multi-section approach to heat exchanger design. Rather than attempting to print an entire large, intricate heat exchanger as one monolithic build — which stresses build volume limits, thermal distortion control, and yield rates all at once — Conflux, in Woodford's words, has "developed ways to create modular parts made up of two, three, or more sections that are joined together into a single component." This lets the company scale geometry and output independently of the size limits of any single printer, while still delivering a unit that performs as one integrated thermal management component. It's a pragmatic answer to a problem that has dogged metal AM aerospace suppliers generally: the parts that benefit most from AM's freeform internal channels are often also the parts hardest to produce reliably at large scale and high volume.

Conflux's own site lists its core product categories as gas-liquid, liquid-liquid, gas-gas, and cold plate heat exchangers — the range of thermal architectures that modern aircraft, electric propulsion systems, and power electronics all depend on. The modular joining technique effectively gives the company a way to address multiple categories and sizes from a shared manufacturing backbone rather than reinventing the production process for each program. Conflux has also picked up AS9100D aerospace quality certification, the kind of paperwork-heavy milestone that rarely makes headlines but functions as a gating requirement for suppliers hoping to be qualified onto flight hardware programs.

Customers Reading Like a Who's Who of Aerospace

The client and partner list attached to this scaling story is notable. Conflux counts Airbus, Honeywell, and General Atomics among its customers, alongside AMSL Aero, the Australian eVTOL maker building the Vertiia aircraft. The company's own site extends that list further, naming Pagani, Kawasaki, Dallara, Rocket Factory Augsburg, and AMCM as partners spanning automotive, motorsport, and launch vehicle work — evidence that the thermal management problem Conflux is solving generalizes well beyond any single sector.

Two recent milestones reinforce the trajectory. In June 2026, Conflux and Dallara publicly launched a liquid-hydrogen technical study aimed at a future endurance hydrogen racing class — a project that is underway rather than complete, but one that extends Conflux's hydrogen thermal-management work from aviation into motorsport. In May 2026, the company received Authorized User approval under AUKUS, the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the UK, and the US — a designation relevant to any Australian supplier hoping to work more closely with US and UK defense primes like General Atomics without running into export-control friction on every transaction.

Hydrogen Aircraft and the THEMEA4HERA Program

Perhaps the clearest signal of where Conflux sees its next growth curve is its role in THEMEA4HERA, an EU-funded research program focused on thermal management systems for future hydrogen regional aircraft. Hydrogen propulsion, whether burned directly or run through fuel cells, introduces thermal management challenges that conventional jet-fuel aircraft don't have: cryogenic storage temperatures on one side of the system and high-temperature exhaust or fuel-cell waste heat on the other, often within tight airframe volume constraints. That combination plays directly to the strengths of metal AM heat exchangers, which can pack far more surface area and more exotic internal channel geometry into a given envelope than conventionally machined or brazed designs. Conflux's participation in THEMEA4HERA positions the company inside one of the more consequential bets in aerospace right now — that hydrogen, not just battery-electric or sustainable aviation fuel, will be part of how commercial and regional aviation decarbonizes. If that bet pays off, thermal management suppliers who have already solved cryogenic-to-hot-side heat exchange problems at production scale will have a head start most competitors won't.

What It Means for Makers

None of this is desktop-printer news, but it matters to anyone tracking where metal AM revenue and expertise are actually concentrating. Conflux's story is a useful corrective to the idea that "scaling AM" means buying bigger or more machines. The bottleneck Woodford describes — post-processing consistency, qualification, supply chain maturity, and design-for-manufacture discipline — is the same bottleneck that trips up smaller job shops and service bureaus trying to move from prototype work into repeat production, just at a different order of magnitude. The modular multi-section build strategy is also a transferable lesson: when a single print exceeds your machine's practical envelope or yield tolerance, splitting the geometry and engineering a robust joint can be a more reliable path to volume than chasing an ever-larger build chamber.

For makers and small manufacturers watching the aerospace AM sector from the outside, Conflux's trajectory — from a 2015 startup to a supplier trusted by Airbus, Honeywell, and General Atomics, now producing hundreds of parts a year with a credible path to thousands — is also a reminder of the timeline involved. Scaling AM into aerospace-grade production is a decade-long project of process engineering, not a firmware update.

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