Developmental Trajectories in Electrical Steel Technology Using Patent Information

Abstract

Recently there has been growing demand for low-electricity consuming transformers and electric vehicles due to global trend of reducing use of fossil fuels and the role of electrical steel became important. Tracing and analyzing research trend and development of electrical steel will give insight for development of R&D direction and strategies. We used patent citation network and GBFP (Genetic Backward-Forward Path analysis) to identify technological trajectories of electrical steel domain and patent contents with other papers to qualitatively analyze research trend of the domain. As a result, we found that some sub-domains of electrical steel domain had close technological relationship to each other in their developmental paths and suggested further R&D direction in the electrical steel technology.