IDENTIFYING LONGITUDINAL DEVELOPMENT AND EMERGING TOPICS IN WIND ENERGY FIELD

To manage strategic deployment timely, investors are looking for visualization of the chronological development and potential technologies. A methodology combines patentometrics, social network analysis, clustering algorithm and text mining is proposed to achieve the task specified in this study. This method divides a field into tight- knit technology communities over time and their inter- year continuity is tracked. Following seven statements are examined as indicators: pace of technological progress, patent age, citation of scientific literatures, pending for patents, frequency of interdisciplinary phenomenon in the cited references, context cohesiveness, and public sector participation. Recently, wind energy has attracted significant attention in the wake of the implementation of global energy policies and greater awareness amongst people of the importance of renewable energy. A set of wind energy patents were retrieved from the database of United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) in this study. These patents defined a number of main evolving technology trajectories. Technological trajectories found include control systems of wind power generator, transmission systems, vertical- axis wind turbines, design of airfoil, style and materials, steering control equipment of blade, and connection methods of grids. Furthermore, these major emerging topics can be divided into two categories: rotor blades with variable angle and speed, and super- grid connection.