The defence industry has been an early adopter of AM (Additive Manufacturing). Its ability to decentralise manufacturing in an operational theatre combined with the ability to design, develop and produce components in an expedited timeframe makes AM technology a key enabler for defence forces around the world.
With enhanced capability for servicing and repairs, additive manufacturing (AM) solutions help keep your fleet deployed and ready.
AM provides the ability to produce components in an expediate timeframe, whilst decentralising manufacturing making this technology an enabler for defence forces around the world.
Legacy platforms can be supported as previous unrepairable or obsolete parts can be redesigned and reproduced at high quality, enabling extended end of life programs for these legacy platforms.
Where traditionally manufactured heat exchangers offer relatively basic and linear geometries due to the limitations in manufacturing techniques, additively manufactured heat exchangers offer the potential to conform to abstract spaces and increase compactness whilst improving or maintaining performance.
Conflux Technology is AS 9100D Quality Certified
Conflux AM heat exchangers provide several benefits within certain defence applications:
AM can also support defence in the ongoing maintenance of legacy platforms. Many defence platforms operate well beyond the anticipated life expected by the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) and shift into a legacy platform mode where subsystems become obsolete and unsupported.
With AM, previously unrepairable components or parts no longer in production can be repaired or produced to extend the life of these systems.
Defence projects have their own unique set of challenges that need to be overcome including operational environments, reliability and servicing. The Conflux team has extensive experience in developing solutions for customers that take advantage of the freedoms AM provides and applying it to unique heat transfer challenges.
AM enables Conflux to develop conformal designs with a more efficient use of space and flexible packaging options for our heat exchange products. Traditionally, the parts within a platform that generate heat are often hard to reposition.
We have successfully developed creative solutions with conformal shapes incorporating these parts to allow for an increase in thermal loads with the most efficient use of the packaging volume available.
Part consolidation
By designing solutions that integrate at a system level, Conflux is able to combine neighbouring parts and fixing.
This consolidation of part numbers leads to a simplification the bill of materials, a reduction in sub assembly lead time and over and overall increase in production efficiency.
Higher Performance
Conflux designs provide superior performance when compared against traditional manufactured heat exchangers due to the inherent freedoms of AM. Conflux designs three dimensional surface geometries that evolve along the fluid paths ensuring the best overall coefficient of heat transfer. This leads to more heat exchange with reduced pressure drop.
Lighter weight
Bringing together the right blend of design, simulation and AM experience has allowed Conflux to develop solution with significant weight reduction as well as improved heat transfer performance. We have seen this is as a key driver to the adoption of AM technologies across the defence sector and we strive to develop solution to allow customers to achieve the weight reduction goals.