Women are having more working opportunities than before. Among them, women with science background are called “Rikejo”in Japan. Rikejo are successful in intellectual property field. Comparing the proportion of women researchers and patent attorneys, the proportion of women patent attorneys is higher. Intellectual property field is the pleasant working environment for Rikejo who hopes to combine the family-life and the career.

Engineers and researchers may have a question why the research results should be filed as patent applications, or have an impression that filing of patent applications is troublesome. In order to respond to such question or impression, this article details the significance of filing the research results as patent applications, the ways to efficiently file patent applications, and ideal relationships between corporations, universities, institutes etc. and patent firms.

In recent years, the number of trademark applications of individuals and small and medium-sized enterprises in Japan has increased dramatically. Regardless of the size of the company, brand strategy is becoming indispensable for the growth of the company. This article describes the basic knowledge of trademarks necessary for brand strategy and outlines the trademark analysis and brand naming.

On April 1, 2020, the revised Design Act came into effect. The revision of the Design Act has brought some significant changes to the design registration system. It is thus necessary to pay close attention to the changes in order to properly utilize the design registration system. First, there is an overview of the previous and new subjects of design protection. Then, the new related design system, which is another major point in the revision, is explained, followed by an overview of strategic design applications utilizing related designs and partial designs.

Patent-search is a required task for engineers involved in corporate research and technology development. This is because engineers understand advanced technology. Another reason is that the environment is ready for engineers to use the patent-database at any time. I will summarize the necessity and timing of patent-search, and I will introduce the points to be noted in keyword-search, which is the basis for patent-search.

Osaka Institute of Technology is the only university in Japan that has a faculty of intellectual property. Students who were amateurs of intellectual property at the time of admission will grow up to a level where they can play an active role as intellectual property practitioners when they graduate. This paper introduces patent education at the Faculty of Intellectual Property, Osaka Institute of Technology.

Intellectual property rights are important to businesses. In particular, patent rights to protect technology can be said to be extremely important. This article introduces methods to increase the number of patent applications and in-house intellectual property activities. It also describes the future of intellectual property analysis. In the future, the results of intellectual property rights analysis will be used in the company's business strategy.

This paper reviews practical uses and recent progresses of scratch testing for evaluating adhesion of surface coatings, especially by an oscillating microscratch tester. It also describes the time-series friction histogram (TSFH), namely, “friction heatmap”, to evaluate friction force and coefficient of fiction between the microscratch probe and sample surfaces. It was shown that the microscratch tester yields many advantages, e.g. sensitive peeling detection of a DLC thin film even though with thickness of 10 nm or less, and reliable determination of critical load (L_c) for optical thin films such as a TiO₂/Au/Cr/quartz substrate. Moreover, the TSFH measurement demonstrates informative visualizations of friction properties not only for amorphous carbon thin film, but also for several plastic substrates: polyacetal, polypropylene and polycarbonate.

This paper proposes a new THL bearing design method based on an improved version of a precedent method. The precedent method used a model expression prepared in advance to easily and quickly find a crucial predicted data of the maximum bearing temperature. Three expressions were prepared for three different values of journal eccentricity ratio, 0.25, 0.5, and 0.75. Which one of the three should be used was determined, based on the preliminarily obtained value of journal eccentricity ratio derived from the initially assumed bearing specifications. Two dimensionless temperature-rise parameters κ₁ and κ₂ were introduced for the common variables of the expression. On the other hand, the new improved method uses a single expression, which is obtained by applying multiple regression analysis and t-test, for the crucial temperature for any value of journal eccentricity ratio. Furthermore, the new expression explicitly includes the four well-known dimensionless numbers used in THL analysis, that is, Sommerfeld number, bearing width-to-dimeter ratio, Peclet number and Khonsari number. The model expressions for other bearing characteristic performances were obtained in the same way. Compared with some measurements in test rigs of cylindrical bearings, the new improved method is confirmed to predict reasonably accurate bearing performances of cylindrical bearings faster and more easily than the precedent method over a wide range of operating conditions.

In general, several mechanical parts are subjected to friction and wear. To prevent wear and high friction coefficient under lubrication, additives can work to reduce friction force, to build up thin film on surfaces which is so-called tribofilm. Recently, Diamond-Like Carbon (DLC) is focused because it has excellent low friction and high wear proof as solid lubricant. However, several researchers already reported that tetrahedral amorphous carbon (ta-C) showed abnormal wear when it rubbed with glycerol mono-oleate (GMO) that is a kind of additive, although it showed very low friction coefficient. To improve tribological properties, new additives were developed that had both phosphate-oxide structure derived from ZnDTP which had high wear resistance and hydroxyl group derived from GMO in one structure. To clarify the effects of the additives, friction tests were performed fixed-roller-on-disk type rotating friction tester. In the friction tests, hydrogenated amorphous carbon (a-C:H) disks, and a-C:H coated rollers were used under boundary lubrication condition at 20-80°C. Friction tests were conducted in Poly-α-olefin (PAO) oil with each GMO and the additives. The results exhibited that a-C:H gave ultra-low friction with the additive. Elemental analysis of the surface showed that tribofilm of phosphorus and oxygen was detected on the a-C:H surface in the additive used condition.