What ever happened to the patent?

Hi guys,

I’ve got news about the Italian patent, which was filed almost a year ago, in September 2014.

The Italian patent office sent the demand over to the EPO (European Patent Office) for the patentability search, and the EPO examiner found a 2013 US patent, due to which, in his opinion, my patent request lacks the required novelty and inventive step characteristics. Permit me to disagree with him…

Well, here’s the EPO examiner search report and the cited US patent (US2013118170A1). I downloaded the patent from the EPO website; it is obviously also available from the US Patent and Trademark Office website. Make up your own opinion about it, then I’ll tell you mine.

Before that, however, I’d like to say something about my intention in filing the patent request: when I originally filed the patent application, I thought there was a formal way to make the Italian patent free for anyone to use, through the “non exclusive use license to the public”, (in the Italian intellectual property law called “licenza per l’uso non esclusivo dell’invenzione al pubblico”). That was my intention, since this project aims to be as open source and free as possible, as part of our NERD program, and instead a patent  reserves the right to use, produce and sell the invention to the patent owner (in this case, my firm, Meccanio Srl). However, I later found out that the “non exclusive use license to the public” actually refers to a sort of public sale of the patent, not to a release of the license to the public. At this point, we at Meccanio Srl thought of making a formal statement in which we consent to the free use of the patent by anyone, and, for future years, we planned not to pay patent fees, so as to let the patent expire.

After that, we received the EPO search report, in which, as shown above, the EPO examiner states that the invention is not patentable: at this point we first thought of not formally replying to the search report, so that the patent would not be released at all. However, if we do not respond to the examiner’s statement, we are implicitly agreeing with him: this means that anybody working on the HomeMadeWatts project, including ourselves, is not free to do so because he is actually infringing the US patent cited by the EPO examiner. So we decided to make a formal reply to the search report, which was filed last Wednesday, July 15th: visit this page to see the content of the reply, and also the modified patent application (we made changes to the patent application to take into account the US patent found by the examiner, the existence of which I completely ignored before).

As I believe to have clearly explained in my reply to the EPO examiner report, the cited US patent does have many similarities with our patent request, however it is based on an entirely different principle of operation: in the US patent, the energy storage is due to the pressure difference between the saturated liquid contained in a “hot store” from that contained in a “cold store”: a temperature difference is required! On the other hand, in our patent request, the pressure difference is due to the different percentage of water content in the liquid ammonia solution contained in the high pressure tank and that contained in the low pressure tank, but said tanks have the same temperature and are in thermal equilibrium with each other. Any comments are welcome.

So, what’s next? Well, Probably in a few months we will know whether the Italian patent office will issue our patent, but in the meantime, as stated above, my firm Meccanio Srl will release a formal declaration in which we allow free use of our patent by anybody, so that this project can continue to be free and open source.

My best greetings, from a beautifully sunny Rome!

 

Quick evaluation of producible energy

Happy new year, folks!

The aim of our first post of the year is to evaluate in an elementary manner how much energy we can extract out of a ton (literally a ton, 1000 kg) of liquid anhydrous ammonia, through its evaporation and expansion. Let us consider 1000 kg of liquid NH3 at a temperature of, say, 14°C. At that temperature, considering liquid NH3 in equilibrium with its saturated vapor, the vapor pressure is  7.045  bar and the vapor specific volume is 0.1805 m3/kg (see http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/ammonia-d_971.html ). If we were to simply let the liquid evaporate and use the obtained vapor to drive an alternating piston mechanism similar to that of a steam locomotive, we would obtain the mechanical energy E:

E = p * V = (0.7045 MPa – 0.101325 MPa) * 180.5 m3 = 108.9 MJ = 30.2 kWh

where 180.5 is the volume of 1000 kg of saturated vapor (note that this vapor could be further expanded until its pressure reached atmospheric pressure, which means we are underestimating the producible energy) and 0.101325 MPa (megaPascal) is the atmospheric pressure.

The above basic calculation shows that from 1000 kg of liquid anhydrous ammonia we can easily extract  an energy of about 30 kWh (kilowatt-hours). This sounds promising. Stay tuned for a more sophisticated analysis…

Italian patent application filed

We’re just getting started: last Wednesday, September 10th, we filed an Italian patent application entitled “Phase-change energy storage system with water – ammonia solution”, which describes the principle upon which our HomeMadeWatts system will be based… well, should be based, since we haven’t tested this with a prototype yet. Of course, since we are in NERD program, we have published the complete patent application, together with its English translation.