Text mining for patent analysis to forecast emerging technologies in wireless power transfer

Governments around the world are planning to ban sales of vehicles running on petroleum-based fuels as an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and electric vehicles surfaced as a solution to decrease pollutants produced by the transportation sector. As a result, wireless power transfer technology has recently gained much attention as a convenient and practical method for charging electric vehicles. In this paper, patent analysis is conducted to identify emerging and vacant technology areas of wireless power transfer. Topics are first extracted from patents by text mining, and the topics with similar semantics are grouped together to form clusters. Then, the process of identifying emerging and vacant technology areas is improved by applying a time series analysis and innovation cycle of technology to the clustering result. Lastly, the results of clustering, time series, and innovation cycle are compared to minimize the possibility of misidentifying emerging and vacant technology areas, thus improving the accuracy of the identification process and the validity of the identified technology areas. The analysis results revealed that one emerging technology area and two vacant technology areas exist in wireless power transfer. The emerging technology area identified is circuitries consisting of transmitter coils and receiver coils for wireless power transfer, and the two vacant technology areas identified are wireless charging methods based on resonant inductive coupling and wireless power transfer condition monitoring methods or devices.