InfoPower

It may look simple, but joining two separate plastic products to form a new product containing ground, neutral, and line screws and folded metal is trickier than it sounds. And once you have the components in place, how do you “weld” a plastic faceplate onto an existing plastic housing?

In comparison to the fireworks of traditional welding’s molten metal, ultrasonic welding is more a wisp of smoke and a tip of the magician’s hat. In the mid to late 1990s, ultrasonic welding had ventured well beyond its plastics and automotive roots of the 1960s and 1980s respectively. By the dawn of the new millennium, ultrasonic welding had expanded far beyond toys and automobile subsystems—it was wired into the consumer electronics industry, including medical devices and components. Though lacking the cachet of robotics and CAD-CAM, ultrasonic welding was already well versed in the language of manufacturing.