Electric current activated/assisted sintering (ECAS): a review of patents 1906–2008

Abstract

The electric current activated/assisted sintering (ECAS) is an ever growing class of versatile techniques for sintering particulate materials. Despite the tremendous advances over the last two decades in ECASed materials and products there is a lack of comprehensive reviews on ECAS apparatuses and methods. This paper fills the gap by tracing the progress of ECAS technology from 1906 to 2008 and surveys 642 ECAS patents published over more than a century. It is found that the ECAS technology was pioneered by Bloxam (1906 GB Patent No. 9020) who developed the first resistive sintering apparatus. The patents were searched by keywords or by cross-links and were withdrawn from the Japanese Patent Office (342 patents), the United States Patent and Trademark Office (175 patents), the Chinese State Intellectual Property Office of P.R.C. (69 patents) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (12 patents). A subset of 119 (out of 642) ECAS patents on methods and apparatuses was selected and described in detail with respect to their fundamental concepts, physical principles and importance in either present ECAS apparatuses or future ECAS technologies for enhancing efficiency, reliability, repeatability, controllability and productivity. The paper is divided into two parts, the first deals with the basic concepts, features and definitions of basic ECAS and the second analyzes the auxiliary devices/peripherals. The basic ECAS is classified with reference to discharge time (fast and ultrafast ECAS). The fundamental principles and definitions of ECAS are outlined in accordance with the scientific and patent literature.     

Information science as "Little Science":The implications of a bibliometric analysis of theJournal of the American Society for Information Science

This paper considers the status of information science as science through an exploration ofone of the leading journals in the field – the Journal of the American Society for InformationScience (JASIS) from its initial publication as American Documentation (AD) in 1950 through theclosing issue of its Silver Anniversary year in December 1999. It is a bibliometric examination ofAD/JASIS articles. Based on our analysis of articles published in AD and JASIS from 1950 to1999, we find that there has been a slow but perhaps inevitable shift based first on the single nonfundedresearcher and author to a much wider research and publishing participation amongauthors, regions, corporate authors, and countries. This suggests not only cross-fertilization ofideas, but also more complex research questions. A small trend toward greater external fundingfurther reinforces this hypothesis. Information may no longer be "little" science, but it is also not"big" science.     

Patent information services in India with special reference to drugs and pharmaceuticals

Patent information is useful to a wide spectrum of users. Chemical patent information is particularly useful to those concerned with innovations in this area, as the chemical patent literature is almost of the same size as the chemical journal literature. National and International patent laws and treaties greatly influence the size of patent literature, its dissemination and exploitation for economic development. Paris Convention, WIPO and PCT programmes have all played an important role in the field of patent information. In India, patent information has a very significant role to play because the country's present law offers wide-ranging opportunities from adaptive development on a foreign patent to its commercialization. Patent information services in India are provided by several organisations which include the Patent Office Headquarters at Calcutta and its branches at New Delhi, Bombay and Madras; Patent Information System, Nagpur; National Informatics Centre, New Delhi; Patent Unit, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, New Delhi; Technical Information Cell, Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, Hyderabad; National Chemical Laboratory, Pune and National Information Centre for Drugs and Pharmaceuticals, Lucknow. Many of these organisations cover all areas of technology whereas others are restricted to particular disciplines. National Information Centre for Drugs and Pharmaceuticals is one such specialised centre restricted to only drugs and pharmaceutical. Its services such as patent bulletin and patent searches on selected drugs have been well accepted by the users. The Centre's holdings of foreign patent literature are meagre and need to be strengthened by acquiring them mainly from the U.S.A., France, F.R.G., Japan, Italy and Switzerland which are the top six nations responsible for introducing new drug substances. With a computer now installed at the Centre, the Centre should acquire INPADOC database and collaborate with existing Patent Information System, Nagpur and National Informatics Centre, New Delhi for better services. A survey of the patent information services in the countries of Asia and the Pacific carried out by the International Bureau of WIPO has put India in the first category because here information services are rendered by both the Industrial property organisation and other outside agencies.     

Nanotechnology-interdisciplinarity, patterns of collaboration and differences in application

Nanotechnology is a novel technological field said to be one of the key technologies in the 21st century revoltionizing information technology, materials and medicine. Bibliometric quantification is a way to show the emergence of a new technology.Braun et al.¹ could establish an exponential growth pattern of publications in nano-science and technology starting in the early 1990s. Using their study as basis we intend to further characterize nanotechnology using bibliometric as well as patent data. We can show that the share of boundary-spanning publications is exceptionally high in the field of nanotechnology. Our co-authorship analysis indicates that countries follow different patterns of collaboration. Some countries tend to have bilateral relations while others collaborate with a much larger array of nations. Patent data in combination with bibliometric reveals differences in the application of science. In our conclusion we raise a number of questions requiring an analysis using also other types of data. Still, a closer investigation and disaggregation of bibliometric data may come up with additional findings.     

A paperless patent documentation and information centre to assist in the transfer of technology to non-industrialized countries

Non-industrialized countries desiring to provide patent documentation and information services should seek cooperation with countries having similar backgrounds to form a regional patent documentation and information centre. This centre should supply bibliographic patent information, copies of patent documents, SDI services, state-of-the-art searches and novelty searches.A paper based patent collection is not feasible in view of the workload involved (more than 300 man-yr) and the necessary storage capacity (15 km of paper documents). Consequently microform and EDP facilities should be used whenever convenient.To provide information on patent documents of the member countries a centralized bibliographic data base and a complete collection of patent documents in microform should be established. Information on patent documents of other countries should be obtained from existing worldwide bibliographic data bases, and from search files existing elsewhere.Patent collections in microform of the most important countries should be acquired and for certain fields of high regional interest inhouse search files could be established.     

Assessing the value of patent portfolios: an international country comparison

Patent counts have been extensionally used to measure the innovative capacities of countries. However, since economic values of patents may differ, simple patent counts may give misleading rankings, if the patents of one country are on average more valuable than those of another. In the literature several methods have been proposed, which shall adjust for these differences. However, often these do not possess a solid economic micro-foundation and therefore are often ad-hoc and arbitrary procedures. In this paper, we intend to present an adjustment method that is based on the analysis of renewal decisions. The method builds on the theoretical model used in Schankerman and Pakes (1986) and Besson (2008) but goes beyond both approaches in that it recovers the important long tail of the value distribution. It also transfers Besson’s (2008) econometric methodology (applicable to the organisational structures of the US Patent and Trademark Office) also to the European Patent Office which is necessary, since each application here may split up into several national patent documents. The analysis is performed for 22 countries. Exemplarily, we find that in the cohort of 1986 patent applications, Danish patents are about 60% more valuable than the average patent. German patents are a bit below average. Japanese patents are of least value. In the cohort of 1996, Danish patents lose some of their lead but are still more valuable than the average. While German are a bit above average, Japanese patents even fall further behind (possibly due to the economic downturn in since the mid of 1990ies).     

An informetric model for the Hirsch-index

Summary The h-index (or Hirsch-index) was defined by Hirsch in 2005 as the number h such that, for a general group of papers, h papers received at least h citations while the other papers received no more than h citations. This definition is extended here to the general framework of Information Production Processes (IPPs), using a source-item terminology. It is further shown that in each practical situation an IPP always has a unique h-index. In Lotkaian systems h = T^1/a, where T is the total number of sources and α is the Lotka exponent. The relation between h and the total number of items is highlighted.     

Highly nonlinear balanced S-boxes with improved bound on unrestricted and generalized nonlinearity

We construct two classes of balanced S-boxes with high nonlinearity 2 ^n-1−2^(n-1)/2 for n odd. From known results, it can be deduced that for any S-box which has nonlinearity 2 ^n-1−2^(n-1)/2, the unrestricted nonlinearity is lower bounded by 2 ^n-1−2^(m+n-1)/2 while the generalized nonlinearity is lower bounded by 2 ^n-1−(2 ^m −1)2^(n-1)/2. We prove that the lower bound on the unrestricted nonlinearity of both our S-box constructions can be increased to 2 ^n-1−2^(m+n)/2-1. For the first class of S-box, the lower bound on generalized nonlinearity can be increased to 2 ^n-1−2^(n-1)/2+m-1. For the second class, the generalized nonlinearity is proven to be exactly 2 ^n-1−2^(m+n)/2-1, which is much higher than the lower bound for our first construction. The first class of S-boxes have low maximum differential while the second class corresponds to GMW sequences, whose algebraic structure allows us to construct a larger family of S-boxes. Moreover, both classes of S-boxes can attain high algebraic degree. We also compare our constructions with some known functions with high unrestricted and/or generalized nonlinearity. Parts of this paper was presented at the 2003 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory [17].     

The organization of Patent databanks at the Ilmenau Institute of Technology

With the establishment of the Polytechnical Patent Library at the Ilmenau Institute of Technology in April 1981, an efficient patent information centre was set up for the southern districts of the German Democratic Republic (Suhl, Gera, Erfurt). First, the manual methods of search were complemented by two subsystems of the automized patent pre-search system, namely the selective dissemination of information and the field-oriented patent family service. In 1985, the set-up of patent databanks was begun. The present paper explains their specific features, thus complementing the conception of the patent pre-search system presented in previous papers.^(1,2) The information services are rendered by order of the Inventions and Patent Office.     

British science in the 1980s — Has the relative decline continued?

In previous articles, the author and his colleagues have shown that British science declined relative to other countries during the 1970 and more slowly during the early 1980s. More recently, the author examined figures for 1981–85 produced by the Information Science and Scientometrics Research Unit (ISSRU) and showed that they were consistent with other evidence on Britain's relative decline. However, those latter findings and the methodology used to derive them have been criticised byBraun and his colleagues at ISSRU, and byLeydesdorff andKealey. This paper begins by examining these criticisms to establish whether there are any grounds for revising the previous conclusion that British science has been slipping in relation to other countries. It then analyses the latest publication and citation statistics. It also presents new data on highly cited papers and on the national distribution of Nobel Prizes. The paper concludes that, although a few isolated indicators might be taken to suggest that British science has been growing in some absolute sense, the great weight of evidence points to a continuing relative decline.     

A new parameter for (normalized) evaluation of H-index: countries as a case study

It is known that the H-indexes of individuals, research groups, institutions, scientific journals, and countries strongly depend on the field of study, slowly increase with the number of publications, N, and can be described by empirical power-law functions of the type H?=?C?×?N^a (C and a are constants and depend on the specific field being analyzed). In this paper, we use this function and propose a new index [Montazerian–Zanotto–Eckert (MZE)], which is normalized by the number of publications and typically varies from ??1 to +?1, to characterize the relative standing of a research group, institution, or author to those of his/her peer groups. Due to the rich statistics available, as an example, here we analyzed and tested the new parameter against the citation-related performance (H-index) of countries. We found that the MZE index readily distinguishes between countries that stand above or below the average (for any given number of publications). Generally, publications of countries with a positive MZE index are more interesting or visible than the average. Analyzing publication output in this manner instead of the H-index allows for a less biased comparison between researchers, journals, universities, or countries for any particular combination of H-index and publication output.

     

How about the ‘ugly duckling’ in China? Some investigations on the use of patent literature in this country

In this second article Mrs. Shen Jialian provides an informative profile of users of the Patent Library of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China, which was described in her first article.     

Patenting and licensing by Spanish firms: Available survey evidence

This paper presents the results of the OEPM (Spanish Patent and Trademark Office)/OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) survey on the economic and financial uses of patents carried out in 2008 among Spanish business applicants of OEPM patents. It also summarizes evidence from previous surveys. All available information indicates that only a few Spanish firms holding patents license them out. Results from the OEPM/OECD survey also reveal that obtaining public support is the first financial use of patents for Spanish firms. Responses to the same OECD questionnaire by EPO patent applicants from several European countries are quite different: licensing out is an extended practice among EPO patent holders from different countries, including Spain, and convincing venture capitalists and private investors are their two most important financial uses of patents. In our view this suggests that there are significant differences across European countries as regards the development of national technology markets and results from international surveys are driven by responses from the largest and more developed countries. The drivers and actors in markets for patents that only protect inventions nationally may be quite distinct from those in markets for patents that protect inventions regionally, such as EPO patents within Europe.     

Numerical experiments with the Bloch–Floquet approach in homogenization

This paper deals with a numerical study of classical homogenization of elliptic linear operators with periodic oscillating coefficients (period εY). The importance of such problems in engineering applications is quite well‐known. A method introduced by Conca and Vanninathan [SIAM J. Appl. Math. 1997; 57 :1639–1659] based on Bloch waves that homogenize this kind of operators is used for the numerical approximation of their solution u^ε. The novelty of their approach consists of using the spectral decomposition of the operator on ?^N to obtain a new approximation of u^ε—the so‐called Bloch approximation θ^ε—which provides an alternative to the classical two‐scale expansion u^ε(x)=u*(x)+Σε^ku_k(x,x/ε), and therefore, θ^ε contains implicitly at least the homogenized solution u* and the first‐ and second‐order corrector terms. The Bloch approximation θ^ε is obtained by computing, for every value of the Bloch variable η in the reciprocal cell Y′ (Brillouin zone), the components of u* on the first Bloch mode associated with the periodic structure of the medium. Though theoretical basis of the method already exists, there is no evidence of its numerical performance. The main goal of this paper is to report on some numerical experiments including a comparative study between both the classical and Bloch approaches. The important conclusion emerging from the numerical results states that θ^ε is closer to u^ε, i.e. is a better approximation of u^ε than the first‐ and second‐order corrector terms, specifically in the case of high‐contrast materials. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

AIDB, the Italian Patent Information Users Group

The Italian Patent Information Users Group (AIDB—Associazione Italiana Documentalisti Brevettuali) was founded on February 24, 2004. At the end of that year, AIDB had 58 members, coming from different environments such as industry, private practice, public institutions, and content providers. During its first months of existence, AIDB coordinated various activities such as checking the extent and quality of documentation services offered by the Italian Patent and Trade Mark Office (UIBM), and promoting discussions about suitable certification schemes for professional patent searchers. In November 2004, AIDB organized a two-day national patent information conference, focused on the business impact of patent information and on the certification of patent searchers.     

A comparison between the journals nature and science

In this paper,Nature andScience, the two distinguished multi-disciplinary scientific journals were compared placing emphasis on their internationality. The items investigated were as follows. A general comparison: 1. number of authors per article, 2. distribution of countries to which first authors' institutions belong, 3. distribution of main discplines studied by first authors, 4. time-lag between the date of receipt of an article by the editor and the date of its publication. B. the position with regard to Japanese author: 1. number of Japanese authors, 2. relationship between the ranking of a Japanese author in the list of authors' names and the country where his institution is located, 3. relationship between the time-lag stated in A-4 and the items stated in B-2. As a result, it can be said thatNature is a more highly international journal thanScience.     

A three‐dimensional C1 finite element for gradient elasticity

In gradient elasticity strain gradient terms appear in the expression of virtual work, leading to the need for C¹ continuous interpolation in finite element discretizations of the displacement field only. Employing such interpolation is generally avoided in favour of the alternative methods that interpolate other quantities as well as displacement, due to the scarcity of C¹ finite elements and their perceived computational cost. In this context, the lack of three‐dimensional C¹ elements is of particular concern. In this paper we present a new C¹ hexahedral element which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first three‐dimensional C¹ element ever constructed. It is shown to pass the single element and patch tests, and to give excellent rates of convergence in benchmark boundary value problems of gradient elasticity. It is further shown that C¹ elements are not necessarily more computationally expensive than alternative approaches, and it is argued that they may be more efficient in providing good‐quality solutions. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Patent Information User Groups in Europe join together: Foundation of the Confederacy of European Patent Information User Groups (CEPIUG)

The Confederacy of European Patent Information User Groups (CEPIUG) was founded in 2008 to promote the sharing of experiences and expertise in patent searching across Europe.CEPIUG currently comprises patent information user groups of seven different European countries and is, of course, open to new members. Besides the exchange of information, CEPIUG also seeks to promote the coordination of European efforts in the fields of education and training of new entrants into the profession of patent searching, as well as trying to identify a suitable certification scheme for patent information professionals.     

The patent system in Singapore

Patent protection in Singapore was formerly only available by obtaining a UK patent grant and then registering the grant in Singapore. The patent system that was implemented in 1995, and has replaced the former procedure, is described here. Applicants can request search and examination, in which case the work is outsourced to the Austrian or Australian patent offices. Alternatively applicants can submit the results of the corresponding search and examination reports carried out by a prescribed office (the patent offices of Australia, Japan¹, New Zealand, UK, USA, Canada (This only applies to Canadian patent applications filed when in English.) and the EPO (This only applies to European patent applications filed when in English.)). A mixed mode of relying on a search from a prescribed office or under the Patent Co-operation Treaty, followed by filing a request for examination, is also possible. The ePatents system, currently providing online Singapore patent register, database, renewal and address updating facilities, is summarised, as is SurfIP, an online service providing a patent search covering many databases and countries, IP management tools, and facilities to assist the commercialization of IP.