Engineering standards are established, formal documents providing technical specifications, guidelines, and processes for designing, manufacturing, and using products, systems, and services. Developed through consensus by professional organizations like ANSI and ISO, these standards ensure consistency, interoperability, safety, and quality across industries by defining characteristics like performance, dimensions, and testing methods. They act as a common language for engineers and stakeholders, ensuring that products and processes meet specific, agreed-upon criteria for their intended purpose.
Key Aspects of Engineering Standards
• Purpose: To ensure safety, quality, reliability, efficiency, and consistency in engineering work and products.
• Scope: They can cover a wide range of technical criteria, from material specifications and design processes to testing methods and documentation requirements.
• Issuing Bodies: Standards are created by national (e.g., NIST), international (e.g., ISO), and professional organizations (e.g., ASME, IEEE) through consensus-based processes.
• Voluntary vs. Mandatory: While following standards is often voluntary, they can be incorporated into laws and regulations, making adherence mandatory.
Why Standards Are Important
• Ensuring Safety: Standards define minimum safety requirements for products and processes to protect the public and workers.
• Promoting Quality and Reliability: They set benchmarks for performance and durability, ensuring products are fit for their intended use and function as expected.
• Facilitating Interoperability: Standards enable different components, systems, or products from various manufacturers to work together seamlessly.
• Boosting Efficiency and Productivity: By providing proven best practices and established guidelines, standards reduce the need for engineers to "reinvent the wheel" for every project.
• Supporting Global Commerce: International standards like those from ISO help to standardize technical requirements across borders, allowing engineers to apply their expertise internationally.
Examples of Areas Covered
• Materials: Specifications for acceptable materials and methods to determine their properties.
• Design: Criteria such as safety factors, allowable stresses, and fatigue analysis.
• Fabrication: Guidelines for processes like welding, forming, and surface finishing.
• Testing and Inspection: Protocols for qualification and acceptance testing of products and components.
These LMU library resources can be helpful in finding engineering standards.
Subjects: Electrical Engineering, Computer Science
Description: Research database containing full text. Collection of content published by IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) which includes journals, conference proceedings, technical standards, books, and courses.
Contents: Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journal Articles; Conference Proceedings; Standards
Engineering patents are legal documents issued by a government, like the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) (https://www.uspto.gov/), that grant inventors exclusive rights to their engineering inventions, preventing others from making, using, or selling the invention for a limited period, typically 20 years in the US. In exchange, the inventor discloses the invention in detail, creating a rich public archive of technical information and incentivizing innovation. These patents, most commonly utility patents for materials, processes, or machines, protect novel and non-obvious inventions and serve as valuable sources of technical information for other engineers.
What They Are
A Property Right: A patent is a property right that gives the inventor the ability to exclude others from using their invention.A Temporary Monopoly: The patent holder receives exclusive rights for a set period (e.g., 20 years in the US).A Disclosure: In exchange for the monopoly, the inventor must publicly disclose the details of the invention, including how to make and use it.
Types of Patents Relevant to Engineering
Utility Patents: These protect new and useful processes, machines, manufactured articles, or compositions of matter, as well as improvements to them. This is the most common type of patent for engineering innovations.Design Patents: These protect the ornamental appearance of a product, rather than its functional aspects.
Why They Matter to Engineers
Protecting Intellectual Property: Patents allow engineers and companies to protect their innovative creations and prevent competitors from exploiting them.
Technical Information Resource: Patents contain a vast amount of technical information, with much of it published nowhere else, making them invaluable for research and development.
Preventing Duplication: Engineers can search patent databases to avoid duplicating research efforts and to find inspiration for improving existing technologies.Incentivizing Innovation: The prospect of a patent encourages inventors to create new technologies, knowing they will be rewarded with exclusivity.
Key Characteristics of Patentable Engineering Inventions
For an engineering invention to be eligible for a patent, it must generally be:
Novel: The invention must be new and not previously known or used.Useful: The invention must have a purpose and function as intended.Non-obvious: The invention must not be an obvious variation of existing technology to someone skilled in the relevant field.
These library resources below can help you find patents relevant for your research.
Subjects: MANY
Description: General research database from Thomson Reuters containing full text. Includes value-added patent information from Derwent World Patent Index as well as patent citation information from Patents Citation Index.
Contents: Patents