Steel industry patents scrutinised anew Safe and Correct
Best Practices:
Freedom-To-Operate (FTO)
- Ultra-high-strength steel
- Specify substrate composition
- Coating provided
- Identify objection material
Chemical elements
STEELmaker combines the working methods of your professional patent researcher with those of your materials scientist:
- Chemical elements and their different spellings and synonyms
- Value ranges in any formulation are found, e.g. greater than 0.3, 0.2 to 8, up to 7
- Units are harmonised, i.e. automatically converted - in mol, volume or mass percent
Test method
STEELmaker allows you to accurately research various testing methods such as tensile strength, fracture elongation, yield strength, and many more. This allows you to quickly and easily obtain highly relevant results for:
- Material properties of the steel
- Value ranges in any formulation
- Units of any kind are harmonised, e.g. MPa, Nmm2, PSI, kg*m/s²*km2 - STEELmaker converts and finds
Substrate or coating
STEELmaker is able to differentiate between the chemical elements in the substrate and the surface coating.
- Substrate - chemical elements
- Substrate - material properties
- Coating - chemical elements
The global world of steel
STEELmaker provides you with the greatest possible security for invalidity searches, as not only the recognition quality but also the data situation are exceptional. You search not only in national patent full texts, but also in global full texts and their machine translations into English. This means that you can search all IP rights worldwide. Articles and non-patent literature also follow.
Workflow - IP department - R&D/material development
STEELmaker offers a unique workflow for time-optimised working methods. Your experts are spared multiple inspections, thus ensuring the best possible monitoring.
STEELmaker - a case study
Digitalization is fundamentally reshaping how your company operates—both internally and in the way you understand and respond to external competition. Internally, continuous data collection combined with AI-driven analytics enables you to optimize processes, predict equipment failures, enhance reliability, and significantly improve operational efficiency. Externally, digital tools now make it possible to systematically gather and analyze information about competitors, markets, and technological developments—transforming competitive intelligence from a slow, manual activity into a proactive, data-driven capability.
A central component of this digital transformation is patent intelligence. For companies across all industries, it has become indispensable for understanding emerging technologies, tracking the R&D activities of competitors, identifying innovation opportunities, preventing redundant development efforts, and minimizing infringement risks. This is particularly relevant in highly specialized fields—such as advanced materials—where even small variations in chemical composition or processing methods can determine patentability and increase the likelihood of unintentionally overlapping with existing IP.
With STEELmaker, infoapps directly addresses these challenges. Its global full-text patent search—supported by high-quality machine translations—gives your organization comprehensive visibility into worldwide technological developments. Most importantly, STEELmaker enables exceptionally precise searches for chemical compositions, material combinations, coatings, substrates, and harmonized units—features that are essential for reliable freedom-to-operate assessments. Its intuitive interface allows not only IP professionals, but also R&D engineers, materials scientists, and innovation teams to easily access and apply patent intelligence in their daily work.
By democratizing access to patent data, strengthening collaboration between technical and IP teams, and simplifying global patent research, STEELmaker empowers your company to innovate with confidence, avoid costly infringement, respond strategically to international competition, and maintain long-term competitiveness in an increasingly fast-paced and digitally driven market.
The most accurate steel search for your company
Make daily patent work easier with infoapps