Patent‐based trend analysis for advanced thermal energy storage technologies and their applications

Abstract

Today, the world is moving towards sustainable and renewable energy resources. In order to ensure sustainable and steady power supply, thermal energy storage (TES) is playing a vital role. Most parts of the literature focus on different techniques and new energy storage materials. There is a scarcity of data on technological inventions in the form of patents to provide information to new researchers and investors before starting their new projects on TES. So this research work seeks to address this gap by concentrating on the patent analysis of various technologies with respect to their global publication trend in TES research field. The proposed research work also elaborates the technological evolution in domestic and industrial applications of TES. This analysis is carried out using patent database search tools IncoPat and Espacenet. Patent documents are retrieved between the time span ranging from 2006 to 2018. According to research findings, the number of published patents related to different TES technologies increase every year. China, the United States, Japan, and South Korea are categorized as main depositor countries. Moreover, technology-based applications and their inventing organizations from different countries are also ranked in current research work.