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Assessment of technological development into charcoal through patent
analysis
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André Luís Castelo Branco Leite2
Douglas Henrique Milanez3 Leandro Innocentini Lopes de Faria4
José Angelo Rodrigues Gregolin5 Abstract Sustainable development is one of the most discussed themes worldwide, especially the effect of greenhouse gases emissions. Biomass has been presented in many studies as an important renewable alternative for energy source and feedstock. Charcoal is probably the most used and studied sort of biomass being used as energy source, reducing agent in metallurgical processes, activated charcoal for medical use, filtering agent for water treatment, and fertilizer. Given the importance of current moment of the world towards sustainability, this paper aims to prospect the technology development related to charcoal by using technological forecasting techniques based on patent documents analysis. The results have shown a considerable growth in the number of patent applications over the years, especially in the period from 2000 to 2009. Materials and Metallurgy is one of the main fields of patent applications in charcoal. Japan, South Korea, China, the USA and Germany stand out as the main assignee countries. Key words: Charcoal; Patent analysis; Materials and metallurgy; Biomass.
1 Technical contribution to the 6th International Congress on the Science and Technology of Ironmaking – ICSTI, 42nd International Meeting on Ironmaking and 13th International Symposium on Iron Ore, October 14th to 18th, 2012, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil.
2 Master Degree student, Post-Graduation Program in Materials Science and Engineering (PPGCEM), UFSCar.
3 PhD student at the PPGCEM at UFSCar. 4 Prof., Science of Information Department, Post-Graduation Program in Science, Technology and
Society (PPGCTS), UFSCar. 5 Prof. at the Materials Engineering Departament, PPGCEM and PPGCTS, UFSCar.
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1 INTRODUCTION Sustainable development is one of the most discussed themes worldwide. Events that bring together world leaders, for instance the United Nation Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), demonstrate the importance of the subject and the growing concern of the nations towards it, especially on the effect of greenhouse gases emissions (1). In this scenario, the use of biomass has been presented in many studies as an important renewable alternative for energy source and feedstock (2). Charcoal is probably the most used and studied sort of biomass. It is obtained by the pyrolysis or carbonization of wooden material in controlled atmosphere and has been produced and consumed all over the world since ancient times. Besides energy source, charcoal is an important raw material for several other applications such as reducing agent in metallurgical processes, as activated charcoal for medical use, as filtering agent for water treatment, and as fertilizer (3-5). In 2007, the world charcoal production was over 45 million tons. Brazil was the main producer, being responsible for around 20% of the total production (6). In this country, over 80% of the charcoal produced is used in the ironmaking and steelmaking business (pig-iron, steel and ferrous alloys production) (7). Given the current moment of the world towards sustainability, it is important to understand the scientific and technological development being carried out regarding biomass application, specially the advances on charcoal production and use. Among the technological forecasting techniques, patent analysis has been widely used to outline useful technological indicators for planning and support decisions making on applied researches and new products and process development. Patent documents are quite relevant source of information because they contain public data of technical, legal and business nature not found anywhere else, in a standard format(8-12). Due to the importance of technological forecasting based on patent analysis, the French institution named Observatoire des Sciences et des Technologies (OST), in cooperation with the French Patent Office (INPI), has made a great effort to develop a more systematic technology classification based on the codes of the International Patent Classification (IPC). The OST classification gathers the IPC subclasses created by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) into 7 technological domains and 30 subdomains. Very informative indicators can be drawn from it, such as the technological fields (subdomains) of charcoal patenting and the charcoal patenting behavior in Materials and Metallurgy area which is one of the subdomains suggested by the OST Classification (13-15). Despite the importance of charcoal for sustainable development, little has been published about its technological advances by using patent analysis. This paper aims to evaluate the patented technology related to charcoal, including the main technology fields, nations and institutions/companies assignees involved. 2 MATERIAL AND METHODS Patent indicators were developed by using the bibliographic data of patent documents indexed in the Derwent Innovation Index (DII) database, available on line at the Journals Portal (Portal de Periódicos) sponsored by the Brazilian institution Coordination for Improvement of Higher Level Personnel (Capes) (16). The DII database includes patent bibliographic data of more than 40 patent-issuing authorities worldwide dating back to 1963 (16). The dataset was recovered by using a
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charcoal related keyword approach to construct the following Boolean search expression:
TS=(charcoal* OR "wood coal*" OR "biomass char*" OR "wood char*" OR "biochar*" OR
"woodchar*" OR "carbonized wood*" OR "carbonized biomass*")
The search was conducted in the topic field (TS), which includes searching keywords in title and abstracts .The period of data collection was from 1952 (the first identified patent related to charcoal) to 2009 (a delay to the present year because of the period of patent disclosure which varies from 6 months to 18 months and interferes on data indicator analysis) (11). The dataset collected was statistically analyzed by using the 5.0 version of the software Vantage Point®. The evolution in the number of patent applications in charcoal per decade was evaluated. A macro-indicator was generated for it. In order to analyze the main technology fields related to the theme and their growth over the years, the data were processed according to subdomains classification suggested by the Observatorie dês Sciences et dês Techniques (OST) (13-14). The OST subdomain growth G was calculated for the period from 2000 to 2009 using the following equation:
100% (1)
N2009 is the numbers of patent documents in 2009 and N2000 is the number of patent documents in 2000. The patenting evolution related to charcoal in the Materials and Metallurgy OST subdomain was also evaluated. Two sub-datasets specifically for this subdomain were created, one considering the interval from 1960 (first patent found) to 2009 and the other considering only the period from 2000 to 2009. The prior sub-dataset was used to evaluate the patenting evolution in the number of applications per decade and the latter for more detailed information including: the main assignee countries and companies, the main IPC subclasses (“4 digits” codes) and their evolution over the last decade, the main IPC subgroups (“8 digits” codes) within the subclasses and the relation between subclasses and subgroups in order to describe and associate important applications of charcoal patented technologies. The main results were presented in graphics and tables. 3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 3.1 Overview of charcoal patenting The total number of patent documents related to charcoal technologies, recovered by the Boolean expression approach, was around 25305 records from 1952 (the year of the first record found) until 2009. An expressive increase in the number of patent documents was observed, especially in the period of time from 2000 to 2009, whose number of applications was 14105 representing about 56% of the total and 182% bigger than the previous interval (1990 to 1999), as can be seen in Figure 1.
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Figure 1. Longitudinal evolution of the total number of charcoal patent documents per decade (1952 to 2009). Household Consumption OST subdomain head the top 5 technological issues in number of patent documents and Materials and Metallurgy appears among them (the fourth) in 2000-2009 period with a significant growth as shown in Figure 2. In contrast, the Environment and Pollution subdomain, which probably emphasizes patents related to sustainability, has a smaller patent application number and decreased slightly in this period of time.
(a) (b) Figure 2. The main OST subdomains in number of charcoal patent documents (a) and its growth (b) in the period from 2000 to 2009. The sum of values presented in Figure 2(a) is 10655. In fact, the main OST subdomains together have 8850 patent applications. The reason for this difference is due to the fact that the same patent can be classified in more than one subclass and IPC codes at the same time (14-15).
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3.2 Charcoal Patenting in Materials and Metallurgy Subdomain As well as for the general charcoal patenting, the interval from 2000 to 2009 has also showed itself as the more significant period of time in charcoal patenting within Materials and Metallurgy OST subdomain, representing 48% of the total applications in the field and presenting 128% of growth when compared to previous decade, as can be seen in Figure 3.
Figure 3. Longitudinal evolution of the number of charcoal patent documents in Materials and Metallurgy subdomain per decade (1960 to 2009).
Japan leads the rank in terms of the number of patents related to charcoal, followed by South Korea, China, the USA, Germany, Russia and Brazil. Japan, the USA, Germany and France presented a more significant application abroad when compared to the other countries, as can be seen in Figure 4, probably due to their importance as worldwide technology suppliers. Most of the patents applied abroad by these countries were in Asian offices, probably the result of the recent establishment of the region as the new center of production, manufacture and technology and its low cost of production. This also suggests the great economic value of these documents. China and South Korea showed the greatest patent application growth over the last decade, respectively, 1220% and 165%. This result probably matches with the socioeconomic moment of these nations and their present scientific and technology relevance worldwide. The USA and Brazil patenting into charcoal in the Materials and Metallurgy OST subdomain grew around 200% and 50% respectively, nevertheless their absolute value of patents applications are considerably inferior then the leading countries.
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Figure 4. Top 10 assignee countries in Materials and Metallurgy subdomain (2000 to 2009).
Figure 5 shows the main assignee companies and also the proportion between the number of patent applications in the assignee country and in other patent offices. Among the main assignee companies in Materials and Metallurgy OST subdomain, six are Japanese and one is German, most of them related to ironmaking and steelmaking business. The Asian assignee companies have applied mainly in their countries, except for Kuraray Chem Co LTD, which is related to the chemistry field, according to Figure 5. The German company (Degussa AG) applied all the patents both at local and abroad offices, probably for its important position as ironmaking and steelmaking technology supplier.
Figure 5. The main assignee companies in Materials and Metallurgy area (2000 to 2009).
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The charcoal related technologies in Materials and Metallurgy OST subdomain, when analyzed by their IPC subclasses (“4 digit code” ) are closely related to no-metallic compounds and elements (C04B and C01B), and also related to metal and alloys processing, production, manufacture and refining (C22B, C22B, C21B, C22C, C01G IPC codes) as shown in Table 1. Table 1. Number of patent documents in the top 10 IPC subclasses in Materials and Metallurgy OST Subdomain (2000 to 2009)
“4 digit” International Patent Classification Number of Patents
Total (2000-2009)
2000 2009
641 57 84
C22B Production or refining of metals; Pretreatment of raw materials
137 11 20
C22C Alloys 57 3 10
C01G Compounds containing metals not covered by subclasses C01D or C01F
46 2 6
C21C Processing of pig-iron; Treatment in molten state of ferrous alloys
44 11 6
B22D Casting of metals; Casting of other substances by the same processes or devices
28 2 12
B22F Working metallic powder; Manufacture of articles from metallic powder; Making metallic powder
24 2 3
C03C Chemical composition of glasses, glazes, or vitreous enamels; Surface treatment of glass, fibres or filaments from glass; Minerals or slags; Joining glass to glass or other materials
21 1 3
As shown in Figure 6, the subclasses C22B and B22D, which are closely related to ironmaking and steelmaking, presented a significant growth in the number of patent documents in the second half of the last decade, around 85% and 733% respectively, more pronounced than the modest increase of subclasses C21B and C22C, and different from the decrease of 25% presented by the C21C subclass.
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Figure 6. Charcoal patenting evolution in the subclasses related to ironmaking and steelmaking per 5 years interval. Table 2 provides the main IPC subgroups level (“8 digit” codes) description for each subclass showed in Figure 6. These codes give a more detailed technology field of the patents documents. Table 2. The main International Patent Classification (IPC) subgroup level codes related to ironmaking and steelmaking
“8 digit” International Patent Classification Number of Patents Code Description
C22B-001 Preliminary treatment of ores and scrap; Agglomerating, sintering, briquetting, binding and granulating
70
C21B-011 Making spongy iron or liquid steel by direct processes
31
C22C-001 Making non-ferrous alloys 31
C21C-005 Manufacture of carbon steel, e.g. plain mild steel, medium carbon steel or cast steel
22
B22D-011 Continuous casting of metals, i.e. casting in indefinite lengths
15
These outcomes demonstrate the widespread application potential of charcoal in the ironmaking and steelmaking production chain. As can be seen in Figure 7, the subgroup levels (“8 digits” codes) represent a large percentage of the patents in each subclass, approximately 50%.
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Figure 7. Number of patent documents per IPC subgroup level code for the period from 2000 to 2009. 4 CONCLUSION This study has shown that the patenting related to charcoal rose sharply over the years. The period from 2000 to 2009 stands out and the number of patent documents grew 128% when compared to the previous interval considered (1990 to 1999). Environment and Pollution OST subdomain is included among the main patent issues involved and this demonstrates the relevance of the effort in developing sustainable technologies using charcoal. The outcome also highlighted Household Consumption as the main OST subdomains, showing its significant increase in the number of documents over the years, suggesting a probable future trend for charcoal related technology development. The Materials and Metallurgy OST subdomain has also presented an outstanding growth in the number of patent applications over the years, especially in the last decade. Japan, the USA and Germany are among the main assignee countries in the Materials and Metallurgy subdomain, confirming their status of technology suppliers. South Korea and China appear in the top 3. This result probably matches with the socioeconomic moment of these nations and their present scientific and technology relevance worldwide. Japanese and German companies appear among the main assignees and this supports their significance as technology developers and suppliers. Most of the main assignee companies are related to the ironmaking and steelmaking business as well as the main IPC subclasses within Materials and Metallurgy OST Subdomain. Nevertheless, in terms of the number of patents applications in the last decade, these subclasses showed an absolute value considerable inferior to C04B and C01B. This suggests a reasonable concern on whether there is still field for research and development into charcoal aiming applications related to the iron and steel world.
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