PATENT CLAIM ANALYSIS

Application Number: 15964967
Application Type: Utility
Filing Date: 2018-04
Publication Date: 2018-10
Patent Classification: ["073", "592000"]

Abstract:
Methods for detection, monitoring, and determination of location of changes in rigid structures with arbitrarily complex geometries are described. Implementations include locating acoustic transducers that generate and receive acoustic signals at multiple locations along a surface of the rigid structure, wherein longitudinal spacing between the transducer locations define measurement zones. Acoustic signals with chosen amplitude-time-frequency characteristics excite multiple vibration modes in the structure within each zone. Small mechanical changes in the inspection zones lead to scattering and attenuation of broadband acoustic signals, which are detectable as changes in received signal characteristics as part of a through-transmission technique. Additional use of short, narrowband pulse acoustic signals as part of a pulse-echo technique allows determination of the relative location of the mechanical change within each zone based on the differential delay profiles.

Claim (Index 5):
The method of  claim 1 , further comprising:\n normalizing the first monitoring transmission signal to the first baseline transmission signal, whereby maximum values of the first baseline transmission signal and the first monitoring transmission signal are equal to about a first selected value; performing Short-Time Fourier Transforms of the first baseline and first monitoring transmission signals using a selected time window size, a selected frequency window size, and a selected time step; calculating a first difference between the Short-Time Fourier Transforms of the first normalized monitoring transmission signal and the first normalized baseline transmission signal, forming thereby a first two-dimensional contour map; and identifying a first frequency-time mode pair in the first two-dimensional contour map, where one feature of the first frequency-time mode pair has a first maximum positive value and the corresponding feature of the first frequency-time mode pair has a first maximum negative value; and calculating an amplitude difference between the maximum positive value and the maximum negative value; determining if the mechanical change occurred in the first zone of the elongated rigid structure based on the amplitude difference.

Metadata:
- Claim Count in Document: 20.0
- Percentile: 91.0
- Lexical Diversity: 1.64706
- Patent Class: 73.0
- Transitional Phrase Type: open
- Component Type: 1
- Foreign Priority: False
- Related Applications: ['15751429', '15666328', '15603156', '13485317', '14432970']

Analysis Scores:
- 35 USC 101 Eligibility (BERT): 0.650412299570729
- 35 USC 102 Novelty (BERT): 0.5289265046548963
- Combined Prediction Score: 0.6382637200791458
- Mean Citation Score: 187.217086
- Max Citation Score: 332.70178
- Similarity Product: 225.5091730113816

Labels:
- Claim Label 101: 1
- Claim Label 102: 1
- Claim Label 103: 1
- Claim Label 112: 1
- Combined Label: 1
- Label 101 Adjusted: 1

Dataset: test