Archive
WIND ENERGY. Latest published applications 2015-2017. Blades and components thereof
Summary
The blades are one of the main structural components of a wind turbine, and largely determine the efficiency of electricity generation. These are the most expensive, bulky and vulnerable parts of the rotor that directly receive all external influences. To increase strength and reduce weight, the blades are made of composite materials based on polymers reinforced with various fillers, including fibre glass, carbon fibre or aramid. When operating in extreme conditions, for example, with strong gusts of wind, cracks, distortions of the profile, and damage caused by a lightning strike can appear on the blades. In winter, the blades can also be subject to icing. Maintenance and repair work on wind turbine blades is costly in terms of capital and personnel. Therefore, innovations in the field of development of preventive measures and improvement of existing technologies providing the required level of trouble-free operation of the blades attract particular interest of the world's leading manufacturers of wind turbines, as well as companies operating wind farms. Recent patent solutions in this direction may be of interest to engineers, researchers and investors, as an integral part of modern innovative proposals.
A selection of patent applications related to blades of wind turbines and published by patent offices around the globe in 2015-2017 is provided for review in the present bulletin. General research methodology can be found at the Advanced Energy Technologies website. The present bulletin includes 2582 patent applications, prepared by applicants from 28 countries and registered in 33 patent offices. The patent documents mention 399 applicants and 723 IPC subgroups.
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 registered the largest number of patent applications were USPTO (US), EPO and CNIPA (CN).
From the analysis of texts of patent applications 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 patent applications 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.
Data is provided for each of the top 10 applicants, leading in terms of the number of published patent documents among the ones examined in the bulletin, illustrating their share in the established intellectual property market, distribution of documents by problems, IPC sections, patent offices and technology indicators. Representatives of Germany and Denmark prevail among the patenting leaders in the examined period of time. These leaders include: Wobben Properties GmbH (Germany), Vestas Wind Systems A/S (Denmark), LM WP Patent Holding A/S (Denmark), General Electric (the USA), Siemens AG (Germany), Senvion Deutschland GmbH (Germany), Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (Japan), Alstom Renewable Technologies (France), Gamesa Innovation & Technology S.L. (Spain), Youwinenergy Gmbh (Germany).
The bulletin contains lists of the top 10 prominent documents having the highest bibliographical rating, the most extensive coverage of IPC sections, and those not being part a of patent family.
A list 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 registered patent applications are provided in the conclusive part of the bulletin.
Who needs this bulletin?
The statistics bulletin under examination serves as one of the variants to monitor advanced technical achievements in the specified industrial sector. The statistical data, rating evaluations and carefully selected patent documents provided in the bulletin can be of interest for inventors, students and educators, engineers, as well as for businessmen and investors, who in one way or another are concerned with the problems of the development of wind energy production technologies.
