Recent Patents on Engineering - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2012

Brewing is a typical example of traditional biotechnology, which has been object of several studies and experiments performed by researchers and simple passionate people. The results of these activities are represented by a number of inventions concerning genetic modifications of barley, microbiological and biochemical applications, alternative raw materials and new technical solutions for processing and packaging. Most of these inventions have been registered as European, U.S., and international patents whose result was the improvement of beer quality, the increase of product safety, and the reduction of production costs in the big breweries that adopted them. The present review includes a summary of the main inventions concerning raw materials, processing, quality, and packaging of beer and beer-like beverages.

The paper reviews recent research work developed for the analysis and design of defective stiffened panels with application to marine and aerospace structures. The review is limited to recent research work evolved over the past three decades. Varieties of numerical modeling philosophies and experimental techniques are discussed. The paper addresses various types of damages such as residual stress, fatigue cracks, manufacturing imperfections, corrosion and welding distortions. The paper also reviews recent patents developed using stiffened plates.

The tribo-electric effect consists in the electrification of certain materials after coming into contact with other materials. This effect may be used in conjunction with the electric field forces for electrostatically separating positivelyand negatively-tribo-charged granules that have otherwise similar size, density, magnetic properties and electric conductivities. Although tribo-electrostatic separation has been used for a long time, its larger-scale application is hampered by a multitude of technical problems that need to be solved: sensitivity to environmental conditions, non-homogeneity of material charging, chaotic particle trajectories, electrode clogging, etc. This paper reviews various recent patents that claim innovative solutions of these problems, allowing increasing efficiency and robustness of the separation. The improvements concern each phase of the process: (i) pretreatment and feeding; (ii) tribo-charging of the materials to be separated; (iii) electrostatic separation and particle collection. Most of the new applications were developed for the recycling of plastics from industrial waste and the recovery of unburned carbon from fly ash. The paper concludes with a description of the future developments expected in the field of tribo-electrostatic separation.

In the last years, Nanoindentation or Instrumented Indentation Technique has become a powerful tool to study the mechanical properties at micro/nanometric scale (commonly known as hardness, elastic modulus and the stress-strain curve). In this review, the different contact mechanisms (elastic and elasto-plastic) are discussed, the recent patents for each mechanism (elastic and elasto-plastic) are summarized in detail, and the basic equations employed to know the mechanical behaviour for brittle and ductile materials are described.

Photocatalytic membrane reactor (PMR), in which photocatalysis is coupled with membrane separation process, is a new hybrid technology for water and wastewater treatment. With some unique advantages such as nontoxic and continuous running, PMR has developed rapidly in the past few years. In this work, different kinds of PMRs are compared and related patents and research progresses are briefly summarized. Operation modes, module structures, variants of membranes and morphologies of photocatalysts are analyzed. Particularly, the configurations of PMRs with low pressuredriven membranes are discussed in detail due to its promising future in water purification. Further, some interesting PMR systems coupled with other membrane technology such as membrane distillation and dialysis are also introduced.

A new design of roof-integrated water solar collector is presented. It takes advantage of new synergies found between collector and roof. Its main concept is based on the use of water redistribution for changing the roof configuration. This system is completely suitable for inclined roofs, since it is based on waterproofed plastic chambers. This design provides a universal low-cost system for household heating and natural cooling that could be even cheaper than conventional roofs with similar (high) thermal qualities. This novel design has been claimed in an Argentinean invention patent application and also it has been internationally claimed.

Several linearization techniques such as predistortion, feedback, quasi feedforward and feedforward which have been proposed are suggested to improve the linearity of a laser transmitter specifically for Radio over Fibre communication system. In general, feedforward linearization technique is known to be more effective since it can achieve reduction in all orders of distortion for large bandwidth and high frequency without needing to know the nonlinear characteristics of lasers. In this paper, we propose an improved feedforward laser transmitter design. The theoretical study shows that the proposed design is less sensitive since the distortion suppression is influenced by fewer parameters compared to other reported works. The simulation results show that the proposed system can achieve the optimum distortion reduction around 30 dB by only adjusting the coupling coefficient of both optical couplers in the distortion cancellation loop, while the phase is matched and the signal is cancelled optimally in signal cancellation loop. Previous works based on feedforward linearization technique will also be reviewed through some papers and patents.

The patents annotated in this section have been selected from various patent databases. These recent patents are relevant to the articles published in this journal issue, categorized by the processes and technologies related to various disciplines of engineering sciences....