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Recently, a patentability search was assigned. After reading the IDF (invention disclosure form), I found out that the IDF is related to the composition of the cement manufacturing process by the addition of Calcium carbonate and Nitric acid to form a mixture to produce Calcium oxide.
Initially, the IDF was thoroughly analyzed, to make a proper understanding and to extract the key features from the IDF. Further, keywords and their synonyms were also extracted.
After that, we started our search broadly to find relevant prior arts in the field of cement production by using mineral tailings. The search strategies were made with different search combinations by using various keywords and IPC/CPC classes.
The preliminary search was performed on the patent databases such as
Non-patent search (NPL) was performed on the databases such as
The other search strategies such as assignee and inventor search, citation analysis, similarity searches, and semantic search were also performed to find relevant references.
The invention consisted of five features that were different from each other. During our search, we came across many methods of cement manufacturing that disclosed the mixing of calcium carbonate and nitric acid to form calcium nitrate, but the real challenge was to find a process of cement manufacturing involving the heating process to form calcium oxide. We also narrowed our search queries to find relevant references.
While analyzing the references both patents and research papers, we analyzed that most of the references were specifically of US, China and Spanish jurisdiction. It was an indication to us that these countries are actively working on this technology on a big scale. Then, we started searching broadly on the native databases such as INVENES, USPTO & CNIPA. Further, we also made some search queries and performed these searches on ORBIT by restricting the patent hits to these countries only.
The search was now directed to find calcium oxide and further heating of calcium oxide with mineral tailings to produce cement. This strategy worked, we found US, GB and CN patents disclosing the formation of Cement by using mineral tailings involving heating of product of the calcium carbonate and nitric acid to form calcium oxide.
We also performed a broad non-patent literature search and found some companies working on the processing of cement by calcium oxide and mineral tailings.
We shortlisted three patent references. The patent references are almost similar to the present invention and disclosed all the key features of the present invention. Further, the two patent references are closely relevant and disclose all key features, but the third reference failed to disclose the use of nitric acid. Therefore, we added two patent references in an additional section of the search report.
The features were mapped with the most relevant prior arts and suitable comments were also provided to support the mapping. At the top of the search report, we also provided an overall search summary based on the analysis of the proposed invention. Further, we also provided important keywords, IPC/CPC classes and search strategies in the search report.