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New Quiz: Electric cars are silent
Electric cars are coming and they are quieter than combustion
vehicles. Many people cross the street without looking too carefully when they
do not hear anything. When you only have electrical cars this may cause a
problem. Why not have cars emit noise to prevent this type of accident? Try
finding patents covering this concept.
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Solution to previous quiz
Catching water from fog
This article depicts a fog collecting device producing drinking
water:
“To most people, fog is a bad thing. It delays flights,
endangers drivers, runs ships aground, ruins the view from mountaintops and
generally makes for gray, damp weather. But to some communities in the
developing world, fog could mean getting enough clean water to drink. Indeed, a
small group of scientists and researchers is creating techniques for wringing
the water from fog. And their success suggests that fog collection may be among
the simplest, cheapest and most environmentally friendly solutions to the water
supply problems in certain remote regions.
Scientists in Chile have experimented with man-made fog collectors
for several decades. The northern coastal areas of the country are extremely
dry but get a lot of fog at the same time. One such place is the fishing
village Chungungo, home of one of the first fog water projects and still the
largest project to date. "There are extensive layers of low clouds over the
ocean, so if you're standing in Chungungo, you look up and there is the bottom
of a cloud and it's a few hundred meters above your head," Schemenauer1 says,
describing the site. "The wind pushes that cloud against these coastal hills.
So where the cloud is touching the hill, you have fog. And that fog will flow
through passes in the hills, it may cover the hilltops or it may just push
against the hillside."
Taking the fog-gathering technique of trees a step further, the
artificial kind use large, vertical mesh panels. As the fog drifts through the
mesh, some of the droplets hit the weave, run down the panel and are collected.
This water can then be used for human consumption or agriculture or to reforest
the area. In that last case, the resulting vegetation can then function as
natural fog collectors, eventually passing part of the gathered water on to the
soil, feeding other plants, wildlife and small streams that humans can
use.”
Using esp@cenet® try locating patent documents on
systems producing drinking water from fog.
Solution
Step one: To find similar patents, identify
the most pertinent aspects of the invention -- common technical features that
may be found in patents relating to the subject -- and for each aspect, define
a comprehensive set of synonyms. This set of synonyms can then be combined as
keywords in the patent database.
In this case, the following concepts -- groups of synonyms covering
the different aspects of the invention -- can be defined:
- fog
- collect*
- water, drinking*
The combination fog collect* water yields a preliminary list
containing some good documents:
Fog-Drop recovery device:
JP2004238803
Device for catching mist or fog microdrops or drops of rain, and
their combination for subsequent storage:
PT102351
Fog water collecting device:
US5275643
Step two: continue the search using the
classification symbols assigned to the relevant documents found
Various classification symbols have been assigned to the relevant
patents.
The best classification symbol covering our invention is
E03B3/28: Methods or installations for
obtaining or collecting drinking water or tap water from humid air
From there on, the search can consist in simply searching for the
classification symbol: E03B3/28 resulting in
this list containing patents covering our
searched concept.
This initial search showed that this type of system is widely known
and protected. A more specific search can start using this classification
symbol combined with keywords.
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