Nowadays, patents are more than an industrial property protection, they constitute a considerable source of information. Several approaches deal with the extraction of pertinent information from patents, some of them translate that information into useful knowledge for problem-solving purposes. However, very few methods use a physical approach and a consistent analysis of the main function in the problem definition phase. This paper proposes a new method to inspire designers with ideas and analogous solutions. The objective is to contribute to solve complex technical problems by exploiting knowledge found in patent documents. The method is divided into three sections: problem definition, research and analysis, and innovation. The first two sections use iteratively a knowledge base formed by pertinent keywords related to the problem context, physical keywords from functional decomposition and physical analysis, and technological keywords recovered through patent analysis. In the third section, interesting patents are classified in a structured discovery matrix from the physical phenomena involved which are crossed in accordance with the related techniques found. The method is supported by a physical effects database of energy conversion and by evolution trends of technical systems. A deep offshore biphasic separator illustrates the method.

One can find innovative solutions to complex industrial problems by looking for knowledge in patents. Traditional search using keywords in databases of patents has been widely used. Currently, different computational methods that limit human intervention have been developed. We aim to define a method to improve the search for relevant patents in order to solve industrial problems and specifically to deduce evolution opportunities. The non-automatic, semi-automatic, and automatic search methods use keywords. For a detailed keyword search, we propose as a basis the functional decomposition [1] and the analysis of the physical phenomena involved in the in the achievement of the function to fulfill. The search for solutions to design a bi-phasic separator in deep offshore shows the method presented in this paper.