Biwi offers high-tech solutions to rubber processors

By David Shaw, ERJ staff

Glovelier, Switzerland -- Biwi SA, A 200-person company in Switzerland, offers high-tech, creative solutions to the rubber industry. Biwi supplies solutions to the watch and jewellery sector, space programmes, the leading edge medical industry and F1 racing teams. The company has specific expertise in rubber, but also in ceramics, leather, metals and plastics and can provide solutions in joining different materials and surface technologies as well as compound development, product design and specialised marketing solutions.

The rubber expertise is delivered by Dr Filomeno Corvasce, director of research and development. Dr Corvasce previously worked at Goodyear in Luxembourg where he pioneered the use of cornstarch as a filler under the Biotred name and helped develop Goodyear's latest generation of Run-On-Flat tyres.

Among Biwi's most recent products are a watchstrap made from Kalrez, the perfluoroelastomer from DuPont. Corvasce acknowledged that a strict technical interpretation might lead to the conclusion that a perfluoroelastomer is over-specified for that application, but the jewellery business is not purely about technical demands. In any case, he noted, high-end watches are used for decades with minimal maintenance, and often passed down generations. So a lifetime of a century or more is required.

On a more technical front, the company offers technologies which permit the bonding of rubber to ceramics and to leather and other materials. Biwi is also well-established in the medical field, offering bone grafts, prosthetic joints and suchlike, using its own modelling software, as well as its own highly skilled craftsmen to make moulds, inserts and suchlike.

Biwi also has a material which has the density of a plastic, yet the characteristics -- thermal performance, electrical properties and physical and chemical strength -- of a metal.

The company also operates in more mundane areas -- O-rings for example, but O-rings for a watch, with outer diameters of around 1mm. Most critical, said Corvasce is to offer a very fast response time, to develop ideas and then to realise them into a product on a timescale of hours or days. on the other hand, where time is less critical, the company works on projects with multi-year timescales.

Corvasce said Biwi typically aims for production runs in tens or hundreds, or even just a handful of products. The company employs around 200 people, of whom half are highly qualified both in terms of academic qualifications, or skills such as mould design or computer modelling.

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www.biwi.ch