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, hydrody Read More

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 variou Read More

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 gen Read More

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 re Read More

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 l Read More

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 algorith Read More

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 Read More

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 t Read More

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.