Recent Patents on Engineering - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2010

The pollution of soils by toxic metals like lead, arsenic, chromium, copper, nickel and zinc has significant economic, environmental and social impacts in industrialized countries. In the last decade, different physical, chemical, biological and electrochemical technologies have been developed to solve this problem. The physical separation technologies for metal-polluted soil remediation are mainly screening, hydrodynamic classification, gravity concentration, froth flotation, magnetic separation, electrostatic separation, and attrition scrubbing. The chemical soil treatments use different extractants like acids or bases, surfactants, salts and redox agents to extract metallic pollutants from soils. The metal-polluted soils can also be rehabilitated using biological means like phytoextraction techniques, the use of biosurfactants and bioleaching processes. Finally, much research has been undertaken in recent years concerning the application of electrotechnologies for soil decontamination, including electrokinetic and chelator-enhanced electrokinetic extraction techniques. This paper covers recent developments in the field of technological options to remove toxic metals from polluted sites based on 16 patents analyzed.

Magnetic transmission is a special kind of transmission. It is mainly used in the special occasions of noncontact power and movement transmission utilizing the characteristics of the non-contact of magnetic force interaction. It can be divided into three types according to different forms of movement: rectilineal motion transmission, rotational motion transmission and complex motion transmission. This paper reviews various recent patents in all types of magnetic transmission and various applications. The patents reviewed concern a period extending from the year 2000 up to date. The applications concern mainly integrated all types of motion transmission covering the area connected with the production of pump, stirrer and other industrial mechanism using modernization that has reached by material replacing, geometry, and embedding additional units into main design. The list of patents reviewed is by no means complete or extensive it shows however the extent of the subjects covered in patents in this area during the last five years. The paper concludes with a description of the future developments expected in the subjects covered.

Mass recirculation is an approach that can substantially enhance CO2 capture and fuel conversion processes in energy generating systems. The current review investigates significant patented developments utilizing mass-recirculating systems in air-fuel, oxy-fuel and membrane-assisted CO2 capture technologies over the last 10 years (2000-2009). Main specific objectives and roles of mass recirculation in variety of power generating systems with CO2 avoidance are expounded with focus on the enhancement of existing CO2 separations and fuel conversions. All searches are also directed at seeking for novelty aspects in different CO2 capture systems but having a common feature, i.e. utilizing an effective approach - mass recirculation. The paper is organized as follows. In section 3, available CO2 separation processes are briefly described, e.g. chemical absorption, cryogenic and membrane separation etc. In sections 4-5, the most important patents are briefly characterized in each of 5 selected categories. The effects of mass recirculation and combustion products enrichment on CO2 separation processes and reactions in fuel combustion and oxyforming are covered. The main benefits of mass recirculation are comprehensively presented in tabular form with respect to specific categories of disclosures. Finally, in section 6, a brief comment on the future directions of CO2 capture technologies with mass recirculation is provided.

In the last two decades, nanotechnology has been playing an increasing important role in supporting innovative technological advances to manage the corrosion steel. This paper reviews various recent patents and patent applications related to the management of steel corrosion, including the use of nanotechnology to produce high-performance steel, to produce coatings with superior abrasion resistance and good corrosion resistance, to enhance the surface of steel designed for oxidizing and corrosive environments, and to prepare nano-sized additives for anti-corrosion coatings or intelligent corrosion protection systems, or for reducing the corrosion risk of the service environment. The 16 inventions reviewed concern a period extending from the years 2005 up to date. The paper concludes with a discussion of current and future developments expected in the subjects covered.

Accurate forecasting of urban water consumption can provide guidance to urban water supply and planning. In recent patents, artificial neural network (ANN) has been applied in urban water consumption forecasting. However, the practicability of artificial neural network is affected due to the weaknesses, such as over-fitting, slow convergence velocity and local extremum. Support vector machine (SVM) is a novel machine learning method, which has excellent generalization ability in the situation of small sample. In SVM, the choice of training parameters has an important influence on the forecasting performance of SVM. Thus, support vector machine trained by genetic algorithm is proposed to forecast urban water consumption in the study, in which genetic algorithm is used to determine the training parameters of SVM and improve the forecasting performance of SVM. Water consumption of Ziyang city in China from 1998 to 2007 is used to study the forecasting performance of the proposed model. The experimental results indicate that the proposed model can gain higher forecasting accuracy than grey model, artificial neural network.

In order to develop a new object-oriented image classification method with fuzzy support vector machines for land cover, an effective fuzzy membership as a function of fuzzy nearness is used for reducing the effect of outliers in sample sets. Firstly, according to the spatial and spectral characteristics of different targets on rectified image, the number of objects was automatically determined by using mean shift algorithm, in which local objects were picked up with arbitrary shapes and unique mode labeling. Then, a comparison to other object-oriented methods, which were standard support vector machines (SVM) and K nearest neighbor (KNN), without such pre-processing was successively validated. Finally, the comparison was also made between the traditional pixel-based algorithm and the proposed approach. A high precision object-oriented recognition system is established for remote sensing images. Experimental results indicate the proposed method is much more accurate than those traditional pixel-based algorithms and object-oriented algorithms without pre-processing in the study region.

This paper reviews the recent development of several nonlocal theories as well as corresponding finite element methods. Discussion focuses on size effects on microscale and the mesoscale material parameters. We can show that both number and role of mesoscale material parameters l are different with the nonlocal theories. In this paper we use the finite element method to model Stolken's microbend test, where three nonlocal theories with one l are adopted. Numerical results show that the existing nonlocal theories with one mesoscale material parameter l are preferred to the theories with more parameters l in engineering. The governing equations of nonlocal theories are inhomogeneous differential equations for which the conventional patch test is not robust and complete. In this paper, based on nonlocal theories of C1 continuity, the variational principles with relaxed inter-element continuity requirements of the nonconforming element and the test function for the patch test are given. The element RCT9+RT9 satisfied requirement of both C0 and C1 displacement continuities simultaneously, is adopted herein. In addition, this paper also includes some information of recent patents on the applications of nonlocal theories.

There are patents that consider some interesting characteristics as are [1] and [2] related with the pneumatic and in [3] the electrical elements for the rapid braking, in this paper, an uniformly stable observer for tire/road friction model estimation during braking process is proposed. In this observer the angular speed of the tire is taken as the output and it is used to estimate the internal friction state, the linear speed of the tire and the relative velocity of the vehicle [4]. It is proven that the state error of the observer applied to the nonlinear model is uniformly stable. The observer proposed is based on the solution of a Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) equation [5]. A simulation shows the effectiveness of the suggested observer.

The patents annotated in this section have been selected from various patent databases. These are recent patents categorized by significant fields of engineering and are relevant to the articles published in this issue.