Joining Castings to Sheet Structures Patents: Top Companies & Trends 2026
Joining Castings to Sheet Structures: Patents Behind Rivet, Adhesive and Forging Joints
54.7% concentration. The five leading assignees hold 47 of the 86 records in scope, a tight cluster around fastener and forging claims. Filings ran from 2 in 2017 to a peak of 4 in 2022, then fell to 2 in 2024 — a 33% drop over the 2021-2024 span. 2025 and 2026 are still filling in under the roughly 18-month publication lag, so the apparent tail-off in the newest years should not be read as the technology cooling.
- 1TEXTRON FASTENING SYSTEMS LTD16
- 2GM GLOBAL TECHNOLOGY OPERATIONS LLC14
- 3ALUMINUM COMPANY OF AMERICA7
- 4MAGNA INTERNATIONAL INC5
- 5UT BATTELLE LLC5
See the full joining castings to sheet structures 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
Common questions about this landscape
Who holds the most patents for joining castings to sheet structures?
One assignee leads the ranked field with 16 of the 86 records in scope, well ahead of the fifth-place holder at 5 records. The top five assignees combined hold 47 records, or 54.7% of all records in scope, and the top ten extend that to 69.8%. Below the top ten the ranking becomes a long tail of 46 companies overall, many holding only one or two records, so the field is concentrated at the top but not closed off underneath it.
Is self-piercing rivet and rivet-bonding patent activity growing or shrinking?
On the most recent clean comparison, 2021 to 2024, filings fell from 3 to 2 records, a 33% decline. Filing peaked so far in 2022 at 4 records. Because publication typically lags actual filing by around 18 months, the 2025-2026 figures in the dataset are still incomplete and should not be read as confirmation the field is shrinking further; they simply have not finished arriving yet.
What patent classes cover this joining technology?
Fastener claims under F16B are the largest single category, appearing in 54.7% of the 86 records in scope, with forging and hammering claims under B21J close behind at 31.4%. Layered-product claims (B32B) and motor-vehicle claims (B62D) each appear in 18.6% of records, while alloy composition claims under C22C appear in only 8.1%. Since a single record can carry several IPC classes, these percentages add up to more than 100% and should not be summed into a total.
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 Joining Castings to Sheet Structures 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.