A steel bracket welded onto a honeycomb sandwich panel - fastened without a drilled hole

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Multi-Material Welding

Fastening lightweight materials without drilling a hole in them

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Challenge

Cars, aircraft and trains got lighter by replacing metal with foams, honeycombs and thermoplastic composites - and then had nothing good to fasten them with. A screw crushes a foam core. A rivet needs a drilled hole, and drilling makes debris and a multi-step process. An adhesive needs cure time, and it cannot be taken apart again for repair or recycling. Worse, every added metal fastener turns a clean single-material part into a mixed-material one that nobody can recycle cleanly.

  • A honeycomb sandwich panel in section - light, strong, and ruined by a screw
  • Expanded polypropylene: a crash pad no mechanical fastener can hold without crushing it

Solution

The answer was already in Biel. WoodWelding - the Creaholic invention that anchors a thermoplastic pin into porous material by liquefying it with ultrasound for a fraction of a second - turns out not to care whether the porous material is wood. MultiMaterial-Welding was founded in 2015 to license that patent and take it somewhere Creaholic had not: foam cores, honeycomb sandwich panels and composites, in the volumes the car industry works at. The element is pressed against the part, ultrasound melts it just where it touches, it flows into the material's own structure and solidifies. No pre-drilled hole, no adhesive, about a second per fastening.

  • In section: ultrasound liquefies the element, which flows into the panel and sets
  • A steel bracket going onto a composite part - no hole drilled first
  • LiteWWeight® Pin
  • LiteWWeight® Lotus, for spreading the load across a soft core

Results

The company moved from licensing the technology to selling products built on it, and now ships a family of five - LiteWWeight® Pin, Double Pin, Lotus and zEPP, and the InWWerse® Fastener - into automotive, aerospace, rail and HVAC. Bossard took a 40% stake in 2020, alongside Germany's SKion, making it a joint venture between the two. The fasteners are in parts at Volkswagen, BMW, Ford, Jeep, Stellantis, RAM and Safran, among others; there is machine-learning quality assurance that checks every part produced rather than sampling them. The double W in the product names is not a typo - it is where the technology came from.

  • A fastening in a production part
  • On the line: the process was built to drop into assembly as it already runs
  • Where it goes on a car - trim, liners, load floors, headliners, crash pads

At a glance

Founded
2015 · Biel - on WoodWelding's patent, itself a Creaholic spin-off
Origin
Licensed WoodWelding® technology, extended to foams, honeycombs and composites
Owners
Joint venture: Bossard Group (40%, since 2020) and SKion GmbH
Notable users
Volkswagen · BMW · Ford · Jeep · Stellantis · Safran

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