ProfArun Arjunan

Professor and Chair of Additive Manufacturing

Director of the Centre for Engineering Innovation and Research (CEIR)

External/Honorary Appointments
Appointed Member of the ‘AMT/8 Additive Manufacturing’ BSI Standards Development Committee

Industry upskilling Training and CPD

Prof Arjunan delivers a range of Skills Training and CPD in Additive Manufacturing, Metamaterials, Metallurgy, Numerical Modelling and Design of Experiments through the Elite Centre for Manufacturing Skills (ECMS). See further information and book courses here https://theecms.co.uk/

Short Biography

Prof Dr Arun Arjunan is the Professor and Chair of Additive Manufacturing and Director of the Centre for Engineering Innovation and Research (CEIR) at the University of Wolverhampton. He led major national initiatives including the £11.6 million Elite Centre for Manufacturing Skills (ECMS) and the £20 million National Centre for Green Electric Materials Manufacturing (GEMM), helping to shape the future of sustainable and high-value manufacturing in the UK.

The University of Wolverhampton was the first UK university to pioneer Laser-Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) Additive Manufacturing through its collaboration with EOS in 1999, a programme now in its 26th year under the leadership of Prof Arun Arjunan. Building on early breakthroughs in processing titanium, steel, aluminium and cobalt–chromium, his Additive Manufacturing Group now advances high thermal gradient materials, developing novel alloys, metalloids, cermets, semiconductors and metamaterials.

By pushing Additive Manufacturing beyond conventional limits by printing of highly reflective and traditionally hard-to-process systems such as copper, copper-silver and diamond-copper Prof Arjunan’s Group has positioned Wolverhampton at the forefront of next-generation additive manufacturing of semiconductors and microelectronic devices. In 2024, Prof Arjunan also established the Centre of Excellence for Shaped Laser Additive Manufacturing at the University of Wolverhampton in collaboration with EOS and AMCM, which is the first institute dedicated to exploring beam shaping technologies. Alongside these experimental advances, he has made significant theoretical contributions through the Arjunan Defect Severity Model linking manufacturing defect to effective thermal conductivity in AM materials, Herschel-Quincke-Arjunan (HQA) model and the Robinson-Arjunan (RA) scaling law providing a predictive framework for self-organised porous metamaterial lattices in LPBF by linking thin-film instability physics with melt-pool kinetics to accurately describe sub-micron length scales in advanced systems such as copper-diamond composites.

He was appointed to the ‘AMT/8 Additive Manufacturing’ BSI standards development committee in 2020, contributing to ISO standards that support UK and international additive manufacturing industries. His contributions have been widely recognised and has been ranked among the world’s top 2% of scientists for five consecutive years (2021-2025). His awards include the GKN Award (2011), the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Contribution to Research (2020), the UK Engineering Innovation Award (2021), the Emerald Literati Award (2022), and the Research Impact Award (2024). He was also nominated for the Blavatnik Awards in the United Kingdom and was a finalist in The Engineer UK Collaborate to Innovate Awards for 3D-printing smart swabs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Through research, standards leadership, and skills development, Professor Arjunan is helping to position additive manufacturing as a reliable, scalable and sustainable technology to democratise compound semiconductor, on-chip heat exchangers and micro-electronic manufacturing for the industries of the future.

Original Models and Laws

Arjunan Defect Severity Model

Predictive framework linking manufacturing defect severity to effective thermal conductivity, connecting metal additive manufacturing process quality and defect formation directly to functional thermal performance. 

Robinson-Arjunan Scaling Law

Scaling law linking LPBF melt-pool physics and thin-film instability to the formation of self-organised sub-micron architectures, establishing additive manufacturing as a platform for process-driven microstructural design. 

Herschel-Quincke-Arjunan model

Acoustic interference model enabling frequency targeted, geometry-controlled waveguides realised through additive manufacturing, linking analytical design directly to manufacturable acoustic metamaterials. 

Selected Accolades

UK Engineering Innovation Awards

Emerald Literati Award

University of Wolverhampton Research Impact Award

Vice chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Contribution to Research
THE ENGINEER UK Collaborate to Innovate

World's Top 2% Scientist (Stanford list)

Recently in media
COVID-19 resistant metal: https://www.metal-am.com/university-of-wolverhampton-researchers-additively-manufacture-covid-19-resistant-metal/
3D printed smart swab could alleviate COVID-19 test concerns: https://www.theengineer.co.uk/3d-printed-smart-swab-covid-19-tests/
3D printed silver implants help tackle infections: https://www.wlv.ac.uk/news-and-events/latest-news/2020/november-2020/3d-printed-silver-implants-help-tackle-infections.php

External links: ORCID, Twitter, Linkedin, Researchgate