Development challenges and opportunities of diamond industry patents
2015/9/3 13:44:13
Artificial diamond is a kind of super hard material, which is widely used in machinery, electronics, medical equipment, geological drilling, aviation, aerospace and other fields, and has broad application and development prospects. The western developed country even took it as a kind of strategic resource, it's synthetic equipment and technology is an important indicator of the level of a country's basic industry. In recent years, with the gradual recovery of the world economy, the world's major industrial countries, the economic growth of the growth rate, the demand for industrial diamonds has gradually increased.
Although, as a big country in the production and consumption of synthetic diamond in the world, our country has many diamond manufacturers. But most of the small tonnage cubic press production, low product yield, grade difference. In recent years, with the continuous expansion of the application fields of diamond tools, the technology level of our country is increasing, showing great development space.
The status quo: the foundation is weak but steady growth
Since the implementation of the patent law in 1985, our country has applied for a total of 800 patents in the world, while foreign diamond industry has achieved more than 11000 patents. Cubic boron nitride (CBN) is a kind of synthetic inorganic crystal material, which is the only one in the hardness after diamond. It is widely used in mechanical processing industry. Each industrial developed countries have to develop CBN as an important material to achieve high efficiency, save energy, ultra precision and operation automation. Abroad since the 1980s, in the CBN of preparation technology and application made a large number of patents, especially in technical and technological aspects of the production of high grade cubic boron nitride single crystal and its products are many patents. In our country, in the 1985 to 2003 years, a total of CBN patents worldwide, only 2.6% of the number of foreign patents.
In spite of this, the situation is still relatively optimistic about the overall situation of the application of diamond patent in China. For example, the composition of the patent, the majority of the invention patents, which shows that the relatively high technology content.
From the point of view of research direction, to study diamond products technology and the application of the diamond obtained special physical and chemical effects of the majority, and concentrated in the direction of saw blades, drill bits and diamond thick film, film production techniques, followed by diamond production process and equipment research, gold diamond production of raw and auxiliary materials and diamond sorting purification process study, indicating that research is more concentrated, is conducive to achieve breakthrough success in a field.
From the patent application amount, before 1995, the number of Chinese patent applications in China increased gradually, and reached a peak in 1995 after a slight decline, but the annual application is relatively stable, from one side reflects the growing maturity of the diamond industry in china.
From the operation mode of patent application, nearly half of the patent application has been applied to the patent office, which has guaranteed the quality of the patent application documents of the diamond industry in China.
Technology comparison: Although the gap is large and large space
Our country in diamond synthesis technology and equipment, high grade single crystal diamond synthesis technology and process and high quality diamond products, diamond film, nano diamond, diamond sorting and detection aspects are insufficient, there is also a huge space for the development of patent.
Abroad at present, has been widely used for both sides top press for diamond synthesis, on both sides of the top press equipment and technology has many patents and the high grade diamond market share is higher, basically control the high-end products in the international market. While China is still in the development stage in this aspect, there are also many problems in the process technology, and there is a considerable gap between the developed countries.
In the production of high grade diamond, China has made great progress, part of the product has been close to or reached the level of similar foreign products, but the number of varieties produced is still quite limited.
In the aspect of diamond products, although the patent of our country mainly concentrates on the diamond products and its mechanical products, the product quality is in low level, especially in the products with high technology content. Therefore, in our country, in the professional matching tool products and diamond products in the application development of the traditional industry, there is a considerable patent development space. Representative such as application development of automobile industry, hard and brittle non-metallic materials processing, wood products and plastic products processing, polycrystalline products industries.
In the synthesis of large single crystal diamond, China also has a lot of space for development. Now, many scientific research institutions and institutions of higher learning in China are actively carried out in this field, but also made great development.
In the use of a variety of methods for the preparation of diamond thick film, technology and other aspects of research, China has made great progress. The research results of the large area of diamond thick film technology have reached the international advanced level, and can form the scale of mass production. The development of diamond film tools is a common problem both at home and abroad. Therefore, how to improve the process technology, production of high toughness diamond thick film to promote its application in the tool is an important development direction in the future, the domestic and foreign patent research in this area has a lot of room for development.
Research and application of nano diamond in China