Nano fibers are defined as fibers with diameter less than 100 nanometres. They are basically small group of atom and molecules with radius of less than 100 nano meters. Particles on the nano scale have a very high surface area to volume ratio, whereas this ratio is much lower for objects on the macroscopic scale.

Nano fiber is engineered to give advantages to ordinary materials making them resistant to odor, moisture and other degrading properties. It helps to increase their elasticity, strength and bacterial resistance. Depending upon the property, a nano fabric is constructed either from nanoscopic fiber called nano fiber or it formed by applying a solution containing nano particles to form a regular fabric.

Nano fiber has huge application in various domains ranging from pharmacy, apparels, medical application beverages and more. Application of nano fiber has the potential to revolutionize textile manufacturing and area of medicine such as drug delivery and tissue engineering.

Patseer Search strategy:

Patseer is a cutting edge technology tool which is smartly equipped to search though vast patent databases, sorting, filtering, analyzing and creating reports. It is a result of outstanding algorithms to bring the word “tedious” out of the business equations and bring out a fresh web 2.0 approach to searching, analyzing, comparing and collaborating and managing patent data.

Patseer was used to develop a particular search query to search and develop the particular patent data set. The search query is shown in the image below.

TAD: Title, abstract and Description

TADC: Title, abstract, description and Claims

IC: International Class

How it works:

The query was directed to search through the title, abstract and claims with one publication per family was generated and imported in Patent iNSIGHT Pro.

After reviewing few results esp. from older publications, we came across some similar but irrelevant terms which we then excluded from full text and irrelevant class were also excluded using NOT operator. And finally a patent set of 3262 records are obtained.

Technical segmentation: Categorization Tree

The categorization tree shown below shows the different categories and the number of records in each of them. The categorization involved defining a search strategy for each topic and then conducting the search using the Advanced Searching capability in Patent iNSIGHT Pro.

IP Analysis: Publication trends

Nano fabric publication have emerged from 1997 but the real surge in activity started sometime in the last 5 years, which saw a drastic increase in the number of patent filings and publications. The spikes in the number of publications clearly show that there will be a steep rise in the domain of nanofibres.

Top Players:

Once the patents were populated in Patent iNSIGHT Pro, the assignee clean up tools were used to

normalize the names.

Different cleanup tools were leveraged

• To locate assignees for unassigned records

• To clean up records having multiple assignees

• To locate the correct assignee names for US records using the US assignments database

• To merge assignees that resulted from a merger or acquisition or name change.

The dashboard tool within Patent iNSIGHT Pro was used to find the top 20 assignees

within the given patent set. A visual graph was created based on the results of the top assignees with the number of patents alongside each one.

Innovation Timeline of companies:

With the dots representing patent filings and the orange lines indicating the timelines between the earliest and latest filings across each company, one can look into the relevance of each company with respect to time. Univ Donghua and Univ Zhejiang appearto be one of the earliest companies pursuing research across nanofabrics. Kolon Ind began filing since 2006 but is inactive with its research even though the research around nano fabrics has increased.

Technology Landscape for Nano fabrics:

The contour map below represents different processes & technologies used in nanofabric production with respect to complete patent portfolio. The nodes were marked with colors by companies.

How it worked:

 The VizMAP tool in Patent iNSIGHT Pro is used for analysis. Firstly the clusters for different process are loaded in the map. They are further analyzed on the basis of their contextual similarities according to the title, abstract and claims. Unrelated patents are removed using the “Hide Unrelated Patents” option and one patent assignee using the options available in VizMAP.

Summery:

The use of nanoparticles and nano fibres to produce specialized nano fabrics became a subject of interest after the solgel and electrospinning techniques were fully developed in the 1980s. Since 2000, dramatic increases in global funding have accelerated research efforts in Nano technology, including nano fabrics research

 The entire report analyzing and categorizing research trends around nanofabric and the process involved in its application is available for download here: [Technical Report]