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New Quiz
Compressing Wind Energy
Wind energy, as its name indicates, is highly dependent on the
presence of wind. If one wants a windmill to be a permanent source of
electricity, some kind storage system buffering energy is needed. One type of
storage could be compressed air produced using wind energy generated during
wind peaks. The compressed air can then be used to operate a generator when the
energy demand is higher than the wind is able to produce. Check the innovative
value of this solution, using esp@cenet®.
Solution to the previous Quiz
The e-cigarette: smoke without the fire
This article describes a new type of electronic cigarette that
claims to be legal even if used indoors:
"They are already a familiar nocturnal sight on the streets of
London - huddles of windswept smokers lighting up outside pubs, clubs and bars.
Now one nightclub claims it has solved the problem, allowing smokers to get
their fix without having to sneak outside in mid-conversation. Celebrity
hangout Chinawhite in Soho is trying out Britain's first ‘e-cig’,
a Chinese-made device that mimics the ritual of smoking but is supposedly
entirely legal indoors.
“The six-inch white plastic stick uses a battery-powered
atomiser to create realistic puffs of ‘smoke,’ while the tip
glows red with each inhalation."
Using esp@cenet, try finding
patent documents covering this type of cigarette and check how innovative this
product is.
Solution
Step one: To find similar
patents, identify the most pertinent aspects of the invention -- common
technical features that may be found in related patents -- and for each aspect,
define a comprehensive set of synonyms. To perform the search, this set of
synonyms can 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:
- cigarette* smok*
- electr*
The combination “electronic” “cigarette”
yields a
preliminary
list containing some good documents like:
Electronic atomization cigarette,
US2007267031
Aerosol electronic cigarette,
WO2007131449
Electronic cigarette,
US2005016550
Step 2: Use the classification
assigned to relevant documents to refine and complete the search.
One of the classification symbols assigned to the above document
corresponds to our invention: Simulated smoking devices, e.g. imitation
cigarettes with an electrical heating mechanism (A24F47/00B2E)
Using this classification as a search criteria yields
this
list containing 564 documents. This result shows that this field is
far from new and that a lot of IPRs already exist. In addition, it should be
noted that many patents that appeared in the keyword search were Chinese. Only
titles and complete documents were available, making a deeper prior art
analysis a real language challenge.
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