Conflux Technology, the Australia-based specialist in heat exchangers made with metal additive manufacturing (AM), has begun serial production of argon gas heat exchangers for the AMCM M 4K 3D printer. AMCM (Additive Manufacturing Customized Machines), an EOS group company, specializes in tailoring existing EOS platforms to meet customers’ specific needs.
Conflux Technology is in the portfolio of AM Ventures, the venture capital arm of EOS’ founder, Dr. Hans Langer. Among other reasons, then, the collaboration between the two companies makes sense in terms of maximizing internal synergy across the totality of EOS-related assets. Conflux will have the argon gas heat exchanger on display at Formnext 2023 (November 7-11) in Frankfurt, Germany, in hall 11.1, booth E45.
In a press release about Conflux Technology’s serial production of 3D printed heat exchangers for the AMCM M 4K 3D printer, Michael Fuller, Conflux Technology’s CEO, said, “Bringing our heat exchanger expertise to the [AM] machine tool industry has been a long-held ambition of mine and is now realized with the successful adaptation of our Conflux Core technology into AMCM’s premier platform. Scaling our business throughout the broader industrial machine sector with our highly efficient heat transfer technology through compelling business cases and uncompromised quality is a key focus for our team.”
Martin Bullemer, Managing Director of AMCM, said, “Conflux’s team of engineers have developed a unique capability to utilize [AM] techniques to deliver superior heat transfer performance. Embedding Conflux’s additively manufactured heat transfer technology enables us to continue pushing the boundaries of what our 3D metal printing machines can do.”
According to AMCM, deployment of the Conflux heat exchanger has been so successful that the company plans to apply the same technology to its upcoming, larger-volume M 8K 3D printer.
The fact that AMCM is already planning to use Conflux Technology’s heat exchanger solutions in additional platforms suggests that as the collaboration continues, it could potentially lead AMCM to develop products that the company wouldn’t have previously considered. Moreover, increased success with utilizing 3D printed parts in 3D printers could allow EOS to once again revolutionize AM-driven supply chain management.
Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how the AM sector can truly achieve its own autonomy from the existing supply chain issues that the technology intends to solve, without significant expansion of the number of printed parts in the supply chains that source the sector, itself. That’s what’s so crucial about the involvement of EOS here, specifically: the company isn’t just an original equipment manufacturer (OEM), but also a key industry stakeholder, as well as one of the leading providers of consulting services.
In turn, anything that EOS does has a much higher than average chance of becoming prevalent sector-wide. This of course doesn’t mean that everyone is about to start 3D printing 3D printers, but it does hint that industry insiders grasp how important an objective that is to work towards, long-term.