Technological Monitoring Applied to Survey-Based on Brazilian Patent Applications about PEMFC

Abstract

The present study aims to show the importance of patents as an instrument of technological innovation and to assess the relevance of technology of PEMFC in Brazil by means of the technological monitoring methodology from 1996 to 2005. This study used different Industrial Property Databases (INPI-BR, ESPACENET and DWPI), in order to retrieve the BR applications in each database. Relevant keywords as “fuel cell” were used in combination with specific IPC (H01M8) in order to assess the main applicants, countries, IPCs and technological innovation over time. In Brazil, the country holding more requests in this area is the United States (US) with 53,7% of the patent applications, while Brazil (BR) accounts for 4,4% of the total requests. It was also observed that the North-American company, UTC Fuel Cells comes on top of the list and that there were no patent applications of Brazilian origin (BR) in other countries.

Keywords

• fuel cells
• ion exchange membrane
• proton exchange membrane
• PEM
• PEMFC