Recent Patents on Mechanical Engineering - Volume 4, Issue 3, 2011

Bubbles are widely used for various purposes, such as product cleaning, medical treatments, food processing, and fishery operations. There are several ways to produce smaller bubbles, such as using venturi tube cavitation, pressure discharge, ultrasonic waves, and swirl flows.?? In a number of recent patents, micro/nano-bubbles generated by a swirl flow have been used in several applications because this method in Read More

This paper reviews recent patented developments in active vibration isolation. First of all, the fundamental limitations of passive vibration isolations are established, to understand the motivations to introduce active control in vibration isolation. Then, the main different active strategies are presented using simple systems and compared. Finally, several specific issues are listed and briefly discussed.

In recent years, significant patents have been devoted to developing non-destructive techniques for damage identification in structures. A crack in a structural member induces a local flexibility which affects the dynamic and static behavior of the whole structure. In this paper, an approach that is able to derive the flexibility parameters in beams with an edge crack based on the strain energy density theory is presented. The met Read More

A calibration method of parallel robots for semi-physical simulation platform of space docking mechanism is presented in this paper. To calibrate the parallel robot, a coordinate measuring machine to measure the distance between three standard spheres on the moving platform and three standard spheres on the base platform is attached to the base platform and the pose calculation is established by the distance informati Read More

This review gives an introduction to the problems (carbonation-induced corrosion and chloride-induced corrosion) associated with the use of carbon steel reinforcing bars (rebars) in concrete. The various strategies and some recently patented technologies for preventing/mitigating rebar corrosion (such as cathodic protection and the use of corrosion inhibitors), together with their strengths and weaknesses, are presented. Read More

Energy conservation is one of the important and prime concerns in the present world. In automobile sectors, there is immense energy loss during various modes of riding the vehicle, such as braking. During braking, the kinetic energy of the vehicle is converted into heat energy that is dispersed in the air. In this article various patents (available in public domain) on regeneration of power that is lost in various sources ar Read More

Residual stresses that develop during the bending correction process of T-shaped elevator guide rails have become increasingly important. This paper reviews in various recent patents on elevator guide rail and rail straightening. The rail has a special cross section that is symmetrical in horizontal major axis of inertial direction but nonsymmetrical in vertical minor axis of inertial direction. In order to study the residual stre Read More

The demand of stringent environmental laws on exhaust emission and the manufacturers' growing desire to cut down the total cost of the catalytic converter by employing lesser amounts of precious elements, needs for the development of improved catalytic exhaust treatment devices. Till now the converters in practice consist of Pt group metals as catalysts, which inherently have very high light-off temperatures for CO oxidatio Read More

Thermo vapor compressor (TVC) is simply a steam ejector employed in multi-effect desalination (MED) system. A well understanding of flow phenomena inside an ejector is important for improving the ejector performance. To optimize the performance of the ejector used in thermo vapor compressor, a three dimensional model for the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was conducted. The results due to the CFD were ver Read More

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 different analytical methods, designs, manufacturing and analysis of automobiles, aircrafts, manufacturing plants, industrial instruments, machines, heating and cooling systems and processes involved and related to mechanical Read More