Archive
BIOENERGY. Latest granted patents 2014-2016. Pre-treatment of feedstock
Summary
Pre-treatment of biomass for further production of energy products is the most important step in its entire processing chain and mainly responsible for the stability of the main processes as well as the quality of the end product. In most cases, some form of mechanical treatment is applied (size reduction, densification, milling…), drying, and sorting. For many types of feedstock additional pelletisation, fractionation or torrefaction is needed. The most difficult types of organic feedstock are treated with hot steam (steam explosion) or various chemical or biochemical methods, such as enzymatic or alkaline hydrolysis. To implement these processes, a multitude of different technical devices are needed, such as monitoring systems, dosing and management systems and methods for effectively organizing the processes.
The proposed bulletin is dedicated to the pre-treatment of feedstock in bioenergy production and includes patents published in 2014-2016. Research methodology is available on the Advanced Energy Technologies website. The patent bulletin includes 905 patent documents. The patents were granted in 31 patent offices around the world. 867 applicants from 35 countries participated in the development of the inventions. 768 subgroups of the International Patent Classification were encountered in the patent documents.
Key Highlights
The bulletin contains statistical data on the distribution of patent documents by years, by patent offices and by applicant countries, applicant-related data (residents and non-residents), data on the most frequently mentioned International Patent Classification divisions (sections, classes, subclasses, groups, and subgroups). The top three patent offices that granted the largest number of patents were USPTO (US), IP Australia (AU), CNIPA (CN).
From the analysis of texts of patents presented in this bulletin, detailed information is extracted for each of the unified indicators, which include: technical problems, types of inventive solutions employed, belonging of a patent document to one or other technological segment. The results of the statistical processing of this data for the entire array of the patents examined are summarized in the correspondingly-named diagrams and tables. In addition to that, a list of the top 10 groups of patent documents with identical unified indicators is provided, where the groups are sorted by the number of patent documents and include ID numbers and applicant names of the documents.
A list of the top 10 applicants by the number of patents includes Xyleco Inc. (US), Solazyme, Inc. (US), Shell Internationale Research Maatschappij B.V. (NL), Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) (IN), FRANKLIN SCOTT (US), Eni S.p.A. (IT), IFP (École Nationale Supérieure du Pétrole et des Moteurs) (FR), ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company (US), API Intellectual Property Holdings LLC (US), Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) (AU). Data representing the share in the established intellectual property market, distribution of patents by problems, IPC sections, patent offices (and technology indicators) is provided in the form of tables and diagrams for them.
The top prominent documents section includes three lists of the top 10 patents having the highest bibliographical rating, the largest number of IPC sections, and the shortest patent pending time.
The conclusive part of the bulletin represents the lists of all of the documents reviewed, arranged by the top 10 groups of patent documents with identical unified indicators and by patent offices with the indication of the ID numbers of the granted patents.
Who needs this bulletin?
The proposed patent statistics bulletin allows the existing trends in the intellectual property market of the specified industrial sector to be timely traced, as well as the possibility of acquiring a carefully selected list of patent documents fully corresponding to the specified subject. The bulletin can be useful for inventors, engineers, scientific workers, and business representatives, who are focused on improving the pre-treatment of feedstock.
