At the Baton Rouge refinery in Louisiana, ExxonMobil faced a recurring challenge: protecting instrument cabinets from oil contamination traveling up thermocouple wires. The component responsible — an anti-wicking device — had design limitations that made it expensive and slow to produce through conventional machining. Switching to Meltio‘s wire-based Laser Metal Deposition (LMD) system, the M600, allowed the refinery to build the part layer by layer in metal, cutting both production costs and lead times in the process.
Before adopting wire-directed energy deposition (DED) technology, ExxonMobil had ruled out titanium parts due to cost, but switching to Meltio’s system made the material economically viable, the company said.
Why Titanium, and Why It Was Difficult
The team settled on Titanium 64 as the target material — lighter and less expensive per part than what was previously used, and already validated within Meltio’s parameter library. However, printing with it introduced several complications. The alloy requires an inert atmosphere during deposition, meaning roughly 90 minutes of purging time before each build. It also demands a minimum of seven minutes between layers to prevent thermal buildup, making single-part runs impractical. Early trials revealed surface oxidation, material accumulation on specific features, and physical displacement of unanchored components during non-extrusion travel moves.
How the Process Was Redesigned
Rather than forcing the existing geometry into an additive manufacturing (AM) workflow, engineers reworked the part from the ground up. A custom fixture, itself printed from stainless steel, allowed four components to be produced simultaneously — which naturally extended dwell times between layers and eliminated the oxidation problem. The main body was redesigned within a 75-degree overhang limit. A non-planar deposition strategy, using the machine’s built-in probing to reference a curved substrate surface, removed the need for support structures. The lid was modified to include hollow perimeters for silicone sealant retention.
Laser power and print speed were reduced selectively in areas prone to overgrowth, and mechanical clamps were added to keep parts locked in position throughout the build.
By redesigning the component and securing it during printing, ExxonMobil said it produced a solid, leak-proof titanium barrier that meets the refinery’s strict reliability requirements.
Outcomes
The shift from subtractive to AM reduced the per-unit cost by 42% and compressed lead times from an estimated four to six weeks down to 58.8 hours. “The ability to manufacture complex titanium components while reducing costs, lead times, and logistical dependence is a complete game-changer,” said José Luis Sánchez, Managing Director at Meltio.
Designing for the Process
The cost and lead time reductions in the ExxonMobil case were not simply a product of switching technology — they followed directly from redesigning the component for AM. Traditional subtractive methods impose constraints on geometry, channel routing, and part consolidation that push up both machining time and material waste. Designing around those constraints, rather than working within them, is what makes the economics shift.
The pattern holds across industries. When GKN Additive redesigned a hydraulic adapter block using design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) principles, it cut the part’s weight by 80% — from 30kg to 5.5kg — by eliminating excess material, removing unused internal channels, and replacing sharp corner connections with smooth pipelines that reduced turbulent flow. The gains came not from printing a like-for-like replacement, but from rethinking the part entirely. Similarly, Wabtec consolidated more than 17 individual components into a single valve unit for its pantograph auto-drop devices, achieving a 70% reduction in weight and lifecycle costs alongside a 50% drop in production time — outcomes that were only possible once the design was freed from the assembly constraints of conventional manufacturing.
The ExxonMobil case follows the same logic. Titanium’s historically high machining costs made it impractical for most heavy industry applications, but wire DED, combined with a component redesigned to be built near net shape, removed the overhead that had made the material prohibitive.
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Featured image shows ExxonMobil using Wire-Based Metal 3D Printing. Photo via Meltio.
