Green Patent Blog®

When South Korean company Mirae Lighting (Mirae) ran out of money before it could start manufacturing its flat panel lights for backlighting LCD TVs, Cupertino, California startup Lumiette, Inc. (Lumiette) bought Mirae’s patent portfolio covering the lighting technology and manufacturing methods in the hopes of selling the flat lights for ordinary residential lighting purposes.

The patent portfolio includes pending patent applications Pub. No. 2006/0279215 and 2007/0247070 (’070 application) directed to flat fluorescent lamps.  Though the lamps work essentially the same way as standard fluorescent bulbs, the difference is that the electrodes 140 are external to the channels 111 on electrode sections 111a, so the bulbs can be made very thin, four millimeters thin to be exact.

According to this greentech media interview with a Lumiette employee, the bulbs also include a reflection layer between the flat glass back panel and the formed glass in front, which reflects light forward and boosts efficiency.  Because the system efficiency is so much greater than in standard fluoroscent bulbs (about 90% versus 60% range), Lumiette’s flat panel lights last longer than fluorescents. 

Lumiette also claims that its lights are as bright as LEDs but at a substantially reduced cost.  It’s good to know that substantial energy efficiency doesn’t always require radically new technology but can be achieved with incremental changes to existing technology.

Deployment of wind power is hampered by the difficulties of transfering energy from the rural areas where wind farms typically operate to the densely populated areas that need the energy. 

Dr. Majid Rashidi, a mechanical engineering professor at Cleveland State University, has designed wind towers that can be mounted on top of city buildings to allow electricity to be generated in large population centers.

Dr. Rashidi has at least two pending patent applications covering his technology.  One of his designs is a helical tower with spiraling grooves, described in U.S. Patent Application Pub. No. 2008/0279690 (’690 application).

The wind tower of the ‘690 application has a helical structure (110) and a spiraling groove (120) defined by adjacent spiraling threads (119, 121).  The groove and threads extend around the longitudinal axis (140) of the helical structure’s central core (320).

In one embodiment of the invention, the helical structure is about 130 feet tall and about 30 feet in diameter.  Turbines (130) having blades with 6-10 foot propeller diameter are positioned at least partially within the spiraling groove (120) of the helical structure (110).

U.S. Patent Application Pub. No. 2009/0015017 (’017 application) just published last week (U.S. patent applications typically are published 18 months after their filing date).  The ‘017 application is directed to a wind power system that deflects wind into two separate flow paths.

The wind deflector (20) has a cylindrical shape to optimize its acceleration effects on air flow.  It includes an interior deflector frame (25) surrounded by a cylindrical shell (24).  The wind deflector (20) has a top spindle (28) fixed to the frame (25) and bottom spindle (27).

Top and bottom cross members (41 and 45) can be rotated with respect to spindles (27 and 28) to position the turbines (30) into the wind.  A drive shaft (35) and a mounting frame (40) also rotate to optimize the turbines’ positions to face the prevailing wind.

Each drive shaft is coupled to a generator (38), and wires (56) carry the electrical power from the generators through an exit connection (59) and on to the city building that needs power.

According to this Ecogeek article, Dr. Rashidi’s towers won’t replace wind turbines, but can complement them to provide onsite power to buildings in large population centers.

Boston-Power, a Massachusetts advanced battery company, makes lithium-ion batteries that charge faster and last longer than conventional lithium-ion batteries. 

Last month, Boston-Power announced that Hewlett-Packard (HP) would be its first customer and would offer its Sonata battery as an upgrade option in select HP notebook PCs in early 2009.  (see the greentechmedia piece here and the New York Times article here)

Boston-Power owns several U.S. patent applications covering its battery technology, including U.S. Application Pub. Nos. 2008/0008928 (’928 application) and 2008/0008933 (’933 application).

Conventional lithium-ion batteries have a cathode (an electrode that circulates electrons) made of lithium cobalt.  The ‘933 application is directed to a blend of two or more different types of cathode materials in the positive electrode which enables manufacturing of larger cells than conventional lithium-ion batteries that use lithium cobalt alone. 

According to the ‘933 application, increasing capacity through these larger cells is a better solution than increasing the number of cells, which raises the probability of over-charge or over-discharge.

The ‘928 application is directed to a battery integrated with a current interrupt device (CID).  When lithium-ion batteries are improperly charged, exposed to high temperatures, or are short circuited, they may produce gas, and the pressure increase can be dangerous. 

CIDs protect against excessive internal pressure increases in batteries by interrupting the current path when pressure increases.  However, according to the ‘928 application, CIDs incorporated within batteries take a lot of space and limit battery capacity.

The invention of the ‘928 application is a battery in which at least a portion of the CID (28) may be located external to the battery can (21) because the CID is in electrical communication with the battery can.  Specifically, at least one of the cell casing (22) and the lid (24) of the battery can (21) are in electrical communication with the second electrode (14) of the battery (10) through the CID (28).

Boston-Power’s technology provides significant advantages over the competition.  According to the greentech media article, Boston-Power’s batteries take a half hour to charge to 80% capacity, instead of 2 hours for an ordinary battery. 

Also, the batteries can last about 1,000 charging cycles (i.e. three years), before the charging capacity becomes substantially diminished, whereas conventional lithium-ion batteries go about 300 cycles or fewer.  As a result, HP will provide a 3-year warranty with the Sonata battery.

This is something I haven’t seen before:  a shareholder derivative action for patent infringement. 

BaoLiang Wang (Plaintiff Wang) is a 22% shareholder of a small California LED sign maker called Sun LED Sign Supply Inc. (Sun). 

Last month, Plaintiff Wang sued Sun, two of its directors, Xiao Ping Wang (Defendant Wang) and Wei Rong Fang, as well as JT LED USA (JT), Sunfire LED, LLC (Sunfire) and The LED, Inc. in federal court in Los Angeles, alleging patent infringement against all defendants and unfair competition against the two directors of Sun.

The patent at issue is U.S. Patent No. 7,245,279 (’279 patent), for which Defendant Wang is the named inventor.

The ‘279 patent is directed to an easily extendable waterproof LED display array.  Each LED unit comprises a tray-like housing (62) containing a printed circuit board (55).  LED elements (31) are soldered onto the circuit board, and an outer covering (45) is attached to the opening of the housing.

A liquid gel provides a watertight seal for the elements on the PCB.  Each unit has a positive power source (20) and a negative power source (21).  According to the ‘279 patent, a significant advantage of the invention is that each LED display unit has its own waterproof arrangement, so each unit can function separately, allowing LED displays of variable length at low cost.

According to the complaint (wang_complaint.pdf), while the application that issued as the ‘279 patent was pending, Defendant Wang assigned the application to Sun, “giving the exclusive right to [Sun] for a period of eight (8) years.”  The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office patent assignments database lists Sun as the assignee of the ‘279 patent.

The patent count of the complaint alleges that defendants’ JT-SLS01, JT-SLS02 and JT-SLS03 series products and similar waterproof LED devices infringe the ‘279 patent.  Defendant LED, Inc. is also accused of selling infringing LED modules.

Under the unfair competition claim the complaint alleges, on information and belief, that Defendant Wang:

. . . via false pretense and deceit, executed assignment of the 279 patent to himself on or about 4/23/2007, without proper corporate authority, violating the previous 8-year requirement, and in an attempt to avoid patent infringement liability.

The complaint goes on to accuse Defendant Wang of using the patented technology to conduct his own business, JT LED USA, dba Jia Tang Electronic Company, in violation of Sun’s exclusive right. 

Plaintiff Wang is asking the court to find defendants liable for patent infringement, to compensate him for his losses and to assess punitive damages on defendants for their alleged fraudulent acts.

So it’s a competing director type shareholder suit with an IP twist.  And because the inventor assigned away his rights, we have a situation in which the inventor is accused of infringing his own patent. 

A recent DOE newsletter reported that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is offering loan guarantees for commercial-scale plants producing advanced biofuels (i.e., biofuels produced from materials other than corn kernel starch).  

The article mentions that U.S. Sugar Corporation (USSC) will apply for the loan guarantees to help fund a 100-million gallon per year ethanol facility in Clewiston, Florida.  

USGC has teamed up with Coskata, an Illinois cellulosic ethanol company that owns proprietary technology for converting leftover sugar cane material into ethanol.  Instead of fermenting the plant material, the Coskata process first converts it to synthesis gas, or syngas, and then ferments the gas using anaerobic microorganisms to produce ethanol.

Coskata owns two related patent applications that cover its ethanol production technology.  Patent Application Pub. Nos. 2008/0305539 and 2008/0305540 are directed to a membrane supported bioreactor system for converting syngas to biofuels (collectively “Bioreactor Applications”).  Both applications published on December 11, 2008.

According to the Bioreactor Applications, some major challenges of the gasification and fermentation approach to ethanol production are that it requires large quantities of syngas, highly efficient dissolution and transfer of the gas to microorganisms, and growth and maintenance of a large density of microorganisms. 

Some bioreactors increase the density of the microorganisms using membranes to develop biofilms, but these reactors must be very large or they won’t provide sufficient gas dissolution rates.

The Bioreactor Applications overcome these drawbacks by using one side of a membrane as the syngas contact surface and the opposite side as the surface for growing the microorganisms.  The gas is fed onto the contact side and transported through the membrane to a biofilm of anaerobic microorganisms, where it is fermented into biofuels.

According to the Bioreactor Applications:

 The result is a highly efficient and economical transfer of the syngas at essentially 100% dissolution and utilization, overcoming limitations for the other fermentation methods and fermenter configurations. The syngas diffuses through the membrane from the gas side and into the biofilm where it is transformed by the microbes to the soluble product of interest. Liquid is passed in the liquid side of the membranes via pumping, stirring or similar means to remove the ethanol and other soluble products formed; the products are recovered via a variety of suitable methods.

If the USSC-Coskata project comes to fruition, it would be the world’s largest second generation (made of non-food biomass) ethanol facility (see the Green Car Congress article here) and would be a testament to the power of using biofilm to convert biomass to biofuel.