ADVANCED MATERIALS & PROCESSES | MAY 2026 21 a minimum. The TheMa4HERA consortium includes designing scalable heat exchangers for hybrid-electric regional aircraft, while also providing shared insights from 28 partners across Europe to maximize energy efficiency and minimize material use. A partnership with AMSL Aero brings these principles to regional air mobility. Together the companies are developing an optimized hydrogen fuel cell cooling system for Vertiia, AMSL’s long-range zero-emissions vertical take off and landing (VTOL) aircraft. These heat exchangers balance weight, volume, and aerodynamic performance to support flight distances of up to 1000 km—an unprecedented range for a hydrogen-electric VTOL. Each of these projects underscores a shared vision: that innovation through collaboration is essential to creating a sustainable aviation ecosystem. THE BROADER IMPACT: SUSTAINABILITY BEYOND PROPULSION While thermal management is Conflux’s business, the sustainability potential of additive manufacturing extends beyond individual components. AM enables localized production, reduced material waste, and shorter supply chains, which are all vital to minimizing the environmental footprint of aircraft development. It also supports rapid iteration and digital validation, meaning better designs can be tested and refined faster, without the need for costly tooling or excess material. Beyond efficiency, AM can contribute to circularity: Parts can be remanufactured, repaired, or redesigned without discarding entire assemblies, extending their useful life and reducing resource consumption. Localized, on-demand production not only and optimized flow paths that ensure efficient cooling without adding un- necessary weight or complexity. This design freedoms of additive manufacturing make a critical difference. AM enables creation of lightweight, high-performance heat exchangers that would be impossible to produce using conventional methods. This process allows achieving exceptionally thin walls and applying tailored depowdering strategies for each part, pushing the technology to its limits. The result is components that can be precisely optimized for each system’s operating con- ditions, maximizing thermal efficiency and heat transfer while minimizing material use. In essence, AM allows engineers to design for performance, not for process, and that’s key to advancing the technologies that will power cleaner flight. FROM HYDROGEN TO HYBRID: COLLABORATION IN ACTION Conflux’s collaborations illustrate how AM is being applied to real-world sustainability challenges across the aerospace spectrum. One program with Airbus is developing heat exchangers for the ZEROe program that feature intricate internal channels optimized for hydrogen fuel cell cooling. These geometries, achievable only through AM, allow efficient heat transfer while keeping weight to AM enables localized production, reduced material waste, and shorter supply chains, which are all vital to minimizing the environmental footprint of aircraft development. AMSL Aero’s Vertiia aims to be the world’s most efficient long-range, zero emissions, electric vertical take off and landing aircraft.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTYyMzk3NQ==