Investment Casting Shell Patents: Top Companies & Filing Trends 2026
Investment Casting Shell and Core Patents: Who Holds the Claims and Where They Sit
34.4% of all 672 records sit with the top five assignees, but the leader alone holds 87 records — well ahead of fifth place at 23. Filings peaked at 30 in 2019 and had fallen to 2 by 2024, an -88% drop from the 2021 level of 16. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, 2025 and 2026 figures are still filling in and should not be read as confirmation that filing has stopped.
- 1GENERAL ELECTRIC CO12.9%
- 2HOWMET CORPORATION8.8%
- 3HOWMET RESEARCH CORPORAION4.8%
- 4RTX CORP4.5%
- 5NALCO CO3.4%
See the full investment casting shell and core technology analysis in Eureka
- The complete ranking, not just the top five
- Every IPC branch with its share of the corpus
- The most-cited records, and where claim space is still thin
Questions practitioners ask about this field
Who holds the most patents in investment casting shell and core technology?
One assignee holds 87 of the 672 records in scope, well ahead of the fifth-ranked assignee at 23 records. The top five combined account for 34.4% of all records, and the top ten for 47.8%, so the field has one dominant filer surrounded by a long tail of smaller entrants. This concentration pattern matters for freedom-to-operate work: a search against the leader’s full portfolio typically covers a meaningful share of the relevant prior art before looking further afield.
Is patent filing in investment casting shell technology growing or slowing?
Filing peaked at 30 records in 2019 and had fallen to 2 by 2024, an -88% drop from the 2021 level of 16. That said, patent publication lags actual filing by roughly 18 months, so the 2025 and 2026 figures in any dataset are still incomplete and should not be read as proof the technology is winding down. The safest reading is that filing has cooled from its 2019 peak through the last complete year of data, 2024.
What technology areas dominate investment casting shell and core patents?
B22C, foundry moulding, appears in 61.8% of the 672 records in scope, making it by far the largest single class. C04B ceramics and refractories (19.0%), B22D metal casting (18.2%) and B28B shaping of clay and cement products (16.1%) follow some distance behind. Because a single record can carry multiple IPC classes, these shares add up to more than 100%, and they should be read as overlap density rather than a strict ranking of separate categories.
Disclaimer. This analysis is based on Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent records and is provided for general information and reference only. Patent data carries inherent limitations — recent filings are under-counted because of publication lag, counts may be on a record or family basis, classification and applicant-name data may contain errors or duplicates, and the underlying search query defines the scope shown — so the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing here is an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Verify independently and review with qualified patent and legal professionals before acting on it.
Method: Filing trend and technology composition. Derived from a Patsnap search on Investment Casting Shell and Core Technology covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish. Every share divides by all records in scope. Data: Patsnap Eureka. See the full landscape report.