Archive
WIND ENERGY. Latest published applications 2017-2019. Maintenance, repair and replacement
Summary
One of most important problems of wind energy is the relatively low-capacity factor, which in real practice of wind turbines rarely exceeds 30%. As a result, huge material-intensive and expensive structures of wind turbines sit idle for a considerable time without generating electricity, reducing the investment attractiveness of the industry, hindering a decrease in selling prices for electricity and limiting the competitiveness of this industry. There is a large group of subjective factors that impede the extraction of the maximum possible capacity factor. These include, for example: ineffective equipment condition monitoring, especially remote monitoring; poor-quality maintenance; untimely delivery of component parts; suboptimal organization of transportation or repair work; lack of high-performance tools for maintenance, which leads to unexpected shutdowns of wind turbines.
Solving these problems can provide additional reserves for the use of power and represents the most promising way to improve the efficiency of the wind power industry in general.
The present bulletin reviews patent applications granted by patent offices around the globe in 2017-2019 in the field related to maintenance, repair and replacement of wind farms. General research methodology can be found on the Advanced Energy Technologies website. 1386 patent documents from 27 patent offices around the world are represented in the bulletin. In total, 447 applicants from 23 countries and 601 subgroups of the International Patent Classification are mentioned.
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 patent applications were CNIPA (CN), EPO and USPTO (US).
For each of the patent documents selected for the examination in the present bulletin the characteristics of unified indicators were preliminary defined, they include: technical problems, types of inventive solutions employed, belonging to one or other technological segment. This allows the internal content for each of the indicators in the aggregate array of documents to be visualized, for instance, to define the sequence and proportional correlation of technical problems the inventive solutions disclosed in the texts aim to solve. A list of the top 10 groups consisting of patent documents with identical unified indicators contains ID numbers and applicant names of respective documents; the groups are sorted by the number of patent documents.
A list of the top 10 applicants by the number of patent documents includes Vestas Wind Systems A/S (Denmark), Wobben Properties GmbH (Germany), General Electric (USA), Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy A/S (Denmark), Beijing Goldwind Science & Creation Windpower Equipment Co Ltd (China), MHI Vestas Offshore Wind A/S (Denmark), Hitachi, Ltd. (Japan), Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (Japan), Senvion Deutschland GmbH (Germany), Gamesa Innovation & Technology S.L. (Spain). Data representing the share in the established intellectual property market, distribution of documents by problems, IPC sections, patent offices is provided in the form of tables and diagrams for them.
The prominent documents pages contain the top 10 patent applications with the highest bibliographical rating, the most extensive coverage of IPC sections, and top prominent single applications.
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 the development of wind power technology.
