Development of a Novel Methodology for Remaining Useful Life Prediction of Industrial Slurry Pumps in the Absence of Run to Failure Data.

Smart remaining useful life (RUL) prognosis methods for condition-based maintenance (CBM) of engineering equipment are getting high popularity nowadays. Current RUL prediction models in the literature are developed with an ideal database, i.e., a combination of a huge "run to failure" and "run to prior failure" data. However, in real-world, run to failure data for rotary machines is difficult to exist since periodic maintenance is continuously practiced to the running machines in industry, to save any production downtime. In such a situation, the maintenance staff only have run to prior failure data of an in operation machine for implementing CBM. In this study, a unique strategy for the RUL prediction of two identical and in-process slurry pumps, having only real-time run to prior failure data, is proposed. The obtained vibration signals from slurry pumps were utilized for generating degradation trends while a hybrid nonlinear autoregressive (NAR)-LSTM-BiLSTM model was developed for RUL prediction. The core of the developed strategy was the usage of the NAR prediction results as the "path to be followed" for the designed LSTM-BiLSTM model. The proposed methodology was also applied on publically available NASA's C-MAPSS dataset for validating its applicability, and in return, satisfactory results were achieved.

Discover Patent Landscape of Two-photon Polymerization Technology for the Production of 3D Nano-structure Using Claim-based Approach.

BACKGROUND: The TPP technology is a "nano-optics" 3D printing technology that develops in recent years. Compared with the traditional 3D printing technology, the TPP-3DP technique that takes near-infrared light femtosecond pulse laser as the light source can break through the limitation of optical diffraction and manufacture nanoscale 3D structures in arbitrary shapes with high resolution. METHOD: The research develops a claim-based patent analysis method to identify technical features via the analysis of claim, especially the analysis of plural elements of independent claim. Furthermore, we analyze the subject matters and technical features of claims through claim-base analytical method to observe the patent trend of competitors and understand the current situation of competitors' technical distribution in related industries, in order to provide useful information for enterprises to determine R&D strategies. RESULTS: The result shows 3M Company possesses numerous patent portfolios that base on the diversified innovative applications of TPP technology. Nanoscribe Company has a long-term advantage in monopolizing this technology. The patents in TPP-3DP field can be grouped into five categories relating to application, including micro-optics device, photonic crystal, biomedical, microfluidics and MEMS. CONCLUSION: The findings of this review confirm the TPP-based 3D printing (TPP-3DP) technology has broad application prospects, of which the hydrogel material applied in tissue engineering and drug delivery is the future trend. Highly-initiated water-soluble initiators are particularly needed to increase its resolution and will be the direction of emerging technology in this domain.

Patent Review on Laser Interference Lithography Technique for Producing Periodic Nanostructure.

BACKGROUND: Because line width has been close to atom size, for semiconductor industry, except for achieving the target of line width, the cost will be more important. The mask-less laser interference lithography (LIL) technique lowers the cost makes it standing out in the market of lithographic equipment of the excessive cost in the semiconductor industry. METHOD: The Keywords of patent retrieval with the theme of LIL are based on the technical features of both the conditions of producing interference lithography and different types of experimental configuration of LIL. Method of patent retrieval include Boolean logic operators are used to express the relationship between sets. Furthermore, it's necessary to find whether common patent classification codes exist in the highly correlated patents and confirm the definition of that. RESULTS: The patent review in this research show the patents of LIL technique are classified according to optical method and lithographic equipment. The patents related to optical method of LIL technique take beam splitter based configuration as the main stream; in the technique of lithographic equipment, the patents of system planning technique are the most. CONCLUSION: The findings of this review confirm the importance of improving the precision of LIL technique for avoiding the defocus of high-density line width. Besides, it's particularly suitable for the micro nanofluid device in the emerging bionanotechnology to observe fluid behavior at the minimum scale. It doesn't need mask and can produce periodic pattern with nanoscale make it devote to the field of periodicity.

A fuzzy ontological knowledge document clustering methodology.

This correspondence presents a novel hierarchical clustering approach for knowledge document self-organization, particularly for patent analysis. Current keyword-based methodologies for document content management tend to be inconsistent and ineffective when partial meanings of the technical content are used for cluster analysis. Thus, a new methodology to automatically interpret and cluster knowledge documents using an ontology schema is presented. Moreover, a fuzzy logic control approach is used to match suitable document cluster(s) for given patents based on their derived ontological semantic webs. Finally, three case studies are used to test the approach. The first test case analyzed and clustered 100 patents for chemical and mechanical polishing retrieved from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The second test case analyzed and clustered 100 patent news articles retrieved from online Web sites. The third case analyzed and clustered 100 patents for radio-frequency identification retrieved from WIPO. The results show that the fuzzy ontology-based document clustering approach outperforms the K-means approach in precision, recall, F-measure, and Shannon's entropy.