How AM Pushes the Boundaries of Thermal Management: Insights From Michael Fuller, CEO of Conflux Technology

March 10, 2025 | Reading time: 5 min

In a recent episode of the Additive Snack Podcast, host Fabian Alefeld sat down with Michael Fuller, founder and CEO of Conflux Technology, to explore how additive manufacturing (AM) is transforming the heat exchanger industry. Their conversation revealed valuable insights into the technical challenges, market opportunities, and future trajectory of this innovative application of 3D printing technology.

 
From Formula One to Founding Conflux: An Engineer's Journey

Michael Fuller's path to founding Conflux was shaped by his early passion for motorsport. At just 12 years old, he wrote letters to Formula One teams asking how he could one day work with them. Following their advice, he pursued an engineering degree and eventually spent 15 years in the European motorsport industry across Formula One, Le Mans endurance racing, and the World Rally Championship.

This extensive experience in motorsport exposed Fuller to two critical elements that would later inform Conflux's creation:

• Heat transfer challenges: Racing vehicles generate enormous amounts of heat that must be efficiently managed for optimal performance.
• Early adoption of AM: The motorsport industry was an early adopter of freeform fabrication and rapid prototyping.

One pivotal realization came when Fuller recognized how AM could extend wind tunnel testing time for Formula One teams. By using 3D printing for complex components like brake ducts — which traditionally required 60-80 pieces of tooling per corner — teams could gain an additional 2-3 weeks of aerodynamic testing time, a trade-off that outweighed the slight weight penalty of printed parts.

After returning to Australia for family reasons, a broken ankle left Fuller homebound for 10 weeks. During this time, he designed a heat exchanger concept that could only be manufactured additively, using a contract manufacturing company’s EOS M 280. This design would become the foundation for Conflux Technology, which he founded in 2014.

The Technical Advantages of Additive Heat Exchangers

Fuller explained that heat exchanger performance is primarily evaluated across three key metrics:

• Heat transfer efficiency: How effectively the device transfers heat between fluids.
• Pressure drop: The flow resistance encountered as fluids pass through the exchanger.
• Weight/packaging volume: The physical size and mass.

Traditionally, these factors involve trade-offs — higher heat transfer typically means higher pressure drop or larger size. However, AM enabled Conflux to break these constraints through:

• Three-dimensional surface geometry with high-resolution features.
• Adaptive geometry that can change throughout the device to account for varying thermal-physical properties as fluids transition from high to low temperatures.
• Optimized internal structures that induce efficient mixing without unnecessary flow restriction.

Performance-to-Cost Ratio: The Market Challenge

While the performance advantages of Conflux's heat exchangers are compelling, Fuller was candid about the current market realities. The company's technology isn't yet aimed at mass-market applications like car radiators for consumer vehicles. Instead, they focus on applications where performance constraints are paramount and cost is secondary — such as motorsport, aerospace, advanced air mobility, and space systems.

Fuller shared a revealing comparison: a Conflux heat exchanger might be one-fifth the size of a conventional alternative, but currently at a higher price point. The goal is to bring this price differential down from "100x to 10x" through continued innovation and scaling production.

The Manufacturing Challenge: Precision at Scale

The manufacturing process for these complex heat exchangers presents extraordinary challenges. Fuller described the precision required:

• Heat exchangers might contain up to 200,000 fin features
• Each fin might connect to tube-like structures in multiple places, creating 400,000 connection points
• The entire structure is built layer by layer over 10,000-15,000 layers
• A single pin-prick leak renders the entire device unusable

The complexity of manufacturing isn't just about achieving this precision once — it's about doing it reliably at scale. This requires a deep understanding of:

• Material properties at thin-wall thicknesses (below 500 microns) 
• Non-linear responses in mechanical properties, such as elongation, at these scales 
• Process parameters optimized specifically for heat exchanger geometries 
• Rigorous quality control systems

The Future: Scaling for Impact

Perhaps the most ambitious aspect of Conflux's vision is their plan to scale production dramatically. Fuller outlined a roadmap to address customer needs for high-volume production — potentially up to 50,000 units annually by 2028-2030.

To achieve this, Conflux is developing a "modular cell-based approach" to production that could be deployed near customers' assembly lines or within their supply chains. This system would include:

• Aggregation of existing technologies
• Custom-designed machines for specific production needs
• A software operating system to manage user authentication, IP protection, and commercial production

The goal is to create a "blueprint" for heat exchanger production that leverages Conflux's IP and expertise but can be deployed globally to meet customer demand.

Market Applications and Industry Adoption

Conflux's technology has found applications across multiple industries:

• Motorsport: Their original market, where performance is paramount
• Automotive: Particularly in EV development, though recent industry pullbacks have slowed growth
• Advanced air mobility: A nascent but growing market with significant development activity
• Space: Conflux is already working with both large OEMs and smaller-tier suppliers
• Industrial applications: Including MRIs and, ironically, some AM machines

Fuller noted that industrial applications present fewer opportunities than transport and aerospace, primarily because space constraints are less critical in many industrial settings.

Flexibility as a Competitive Advantage

Beyond pure performance metrics, Fuller highlighted another significant advantage of Conflux's approach: flexibility in design and production. Unlike conventional heat exchangers, which often require significant retooling for design changes, Conflux can rapidly iterate and customize designs.

This flexibility manifests in two primary offerings:

• Configurable product families: Pre-developed designs that can be quickly adapted to specific customer needs with minimal non-recurring engineering costs 
• Fully-customized solutions: Complete development programs for unique applications with extreme requirements

The Path Forward: Challenges and Opportunities

As Conflux continues to mature, the company must balance research and development investment between performance improvements and cost reduction. They need to carefully select materials based on both technical requirements and market demand, going through rigorous characterization and process development for each new material they adopt.

Scaling production to meet future demand remains their most significant challenge, but also their greatest opportunity. By developing production systems that can be deployed globally, Conflux aims to transform heat exchanger manufacturing and make their high-performance solutions available at scale.

As Fuller concluded, this isn't just about creating better heat exchangers — it's about "scaling for impact."

The journey from a Formula One engineer's concept to a global manufacturing blueprint is ambitious, but Conflux Technology appears well-positioned to lead this transformation in thermal management.

For more insights from Michael Fuller and the future of additive manufacturing for heat exchangers, listen to the full episode of the Additive Snack Podcast.