The Importance of Patent Information in Corrosion Research

摘要

Any investigation has to take into account previous results. It has no matter to repeat investigations already made. In addition to recent literature published in journals included in Science Citation Index and other, there is a very important source of information in Patent databases. As it has been established, a Patent Application should be made before any publication. A grant Patent is that the result presented should have novelty, so commonly it is obtained from a research activity. A strategic study of the development of inventions in a given field of research can be made through Patent information. In this paper we used an Automated System for Patent Surveillance (SiVigPat) to study the development of international Patens concerning concrete corrosion and protection. An increase of patent Application has been observed since 1989 in the field of concrete corrosion and protection. Databases processed were from United States, Canada, Japan and others. Patents related with concrete corrosion and protections were divided in three main topics: monitoring, electrochemical protection and admixtures. The higher number of Patent Application is related to chemical admixtures. A tendency to increase Patents concerning Electrochemical Protection and Monitoring is observed since 1984. The corporations having more Patents number and the authors and their activity have been studied. The countries involved in Patent Application have been also studied. The analysis of citation in Patents offers the possibility to obtain new and very valuable information. When all the different types of admixture and methods for Electrochemical Protection, as also monitoring methods are studied, a complete state of the art in the field is obtained. Together with other study of trends in the different aspects a complete orientation of the investigations can be made. It improves the quality of the results to be obtained and enhances its novelty.