A systematic approach to identify technological trends related to chitin and chitosan using three-window analytics

Abstract

We present a novel systematic approach called three-window analytics for identifying technological trends for chitin, the second-most abundant polymer found in nature, and its derivative, chitosan. For this analytics, we used patent documents filed from 2006 to 2020 under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) containing chitin and chitosan in the title, abstract, and claims to build code-keyword matrices. These matrices merged into a matrix containing relevant patent data across three-time windows called the three-window matrix. Two types of three-window matrices were constructed for the International Patent Classification (IPC) and Cooperation Patent Classification (CPC) systems. A combination of two ternary forms was developed to systematically categorize seven technological trends: active, inactive, emerging, declining, emerging to active, declining to active, and volatile. We focused on energy applications for both classification systems to identify emerging applications. In the main finding, chitin-based and chitosan-based technologies exhibit an emerging trend in manufacturing non-active parts and electrodes for batteries under the patent classification codes, H01M 2 and H01M 4, for both systems. These findings suggest emerging innovative activities incorporating chitin and chitosan into electrochemical battery technology to enhance battery performance and efficiency for storing electrical energy from renewable energy sources. This is further supported by recent Scopus-indexed academic literature published with similar keywords found in previously granted patents. The insights from the three-window analytics highlight how chitin and chitosan are ideal sustainable materials for environmentally friendly energy storage systems contributing to the green energy transition toward net zero.