US 9645064

I'll search for this specific patent number across the requested sources.

Let me check for litigation and pull the claim text.

Let me retrieve the full claim set to identify all independent claims.

Summary — US 9,645,064 B1

Important scope note: I searched for the literal identifier "9645064" / "US 9,645,064." The number resolves cleanly to the patent below. One caution: the bare string "9645064" also appears in unrelated documents — e.g., EP 0 836 184 A3 lists a Korean priority application "KR 9645064," and EP publication tables cite other numbers. Those are different identifiers and are not the patent you asked about. I did not auto-correct or conflate them.

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Bibliographic data (from the granted patent front page and Google Patents)

Abstract (verbatim): "An example method includes positioning a mass at a height opposite a modulator characterized by a particular strain rate and support by a carrier moveably disposed opposite the mass. The method also includes releasing the mass such that the mass impacts the modulator, and an additional component connected to the carrier causes failure of a sample of material. The method further includes determining a displacement of the carrier corresponding to failure of the sample, determining a force applied to the modulator by the mass and resulting in failure of the sample, and determining at least one of a dynamic strength of the sample and a dynamic modulus of the sample. In such a method, the dynamic strength is based on the force applied to the modulator and the strain rate. Additionally, the dynamic modulus is based on the displacement of the carrier and the strain rate."

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Plain-language overview of the disclosure

The patent describes a drop-weight impact tester for measuring dynamic strength and modulus of brittle or hazardous materials (glass display sheets, battery casings) at controlled strain rates. A mass falls along guides onto a modulator (a rubber/plastic energy-absorbing puck of known strain rate) mounted on a carrier. The carrier drives an anvil into the sample, breaking it. Two sensors capture (a) carrier/plunger displacement at failure and (b) impact force at the modulator. A controller then computes dynamic strength from force + strain rate, and dynamic modulus from displacement + strain rate. A second embodiment (FIG. 2) puts the sample inside a vented/vacuum enclosure with inert-gas purge and flame arrestor for battery puncture testing. FIGS. 5–6 build strain-rate-vs-yield-strength and strain-rate-vs-Young's-modulus curves across multiple samples.

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Independent claims (plain language)

Claim 1 — Method (three-point bend test on glass). Position a mass above a first piece of material of known strain rate sitting on a carrier; two support anvils sit under the sample and a third anvil is attached to the carrier. Release the mass so it strikes the modulator, driving the carrier and third anvil down to break the glass. Determine the carrier displacement and the applied force at the failure point, then compute:

• dynamic strength σ(ε) = 3FL/WT²
• dynamic modulus M(ε) = mL³/4WT³

where F = force, L = distance between the two lower anvil peaks, W = sample width, T = sample thickness, and m = slope of the force-vs-displacement best-fit line.

Claim 19 — Method (general carrier/modulator case). Position a mass above a modulator of a given strain rate that is supported by a carrier; release the mass so the impact moves the carrier and an attached component causes sample failure; determine carrier displacement at failure and force applied to the modulator at failure; then determine dynamic strength and/or dynamic modulus, where strength is based on force + strain rate and modulus is based on carrier displacement + strain rate. (Claim 20 depends from claim 19 and adds testing a second sample at a second strain rate to derive an actual strength/modulus.)

Uncertainty flag: I can confirm claim 1 and claim 19/20 from the claim text retrieved, but I could not authoritatively verify the complete list of independent claims (e.g., whether an apparatus/system claim is also independent among claims 5–18). Justia's page indicates all remaining claims (2–4, 20, etc.) depend from claims 1 and 19, but I did not obtain a full verbatim claim set. Treat the independent-claim count as unverified.

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CAFC / USPTO docket check for "9645064"

• No CAFC 2026 (or any-year) appeal or docket entry naming US 9,645,064 was found. My searches surfaced only unrelated Federal Circuit/PTAB matters involving Amazon (e.g., Amazon.com v. Swarm Technology, Nos. 23‑2323 / 24‑xxxx, IPRs on the '004 and '275 patents; SoundClear Technologies v. Amazon, IPR2025‑01080/01067/01096). None reference 9,645,064.
• I found no litigation, IPR, or PGR proceeding citing this patent. USPTO's public record shows only the original prosecution and the 2017 assignment to Amazon Technologies, Inc.
• The single live status entry is "Expired – Fee Related," adjusted expiration 2035‑11‑05 — i.e., the patent lapsed for failure to pay maintenance fees prior to expiration.

Confidence: High on bibliographic data, abstract, and the two independent-claim bodies quoted above (verified against the granted PDF and Justia). Lower on the exact independent/dependent claim split and on the negative litigation finding (absence of evidence from a limited search, not proof of absence). If you need documentary certainty, I'd pull the full claim set directly from USPTO PatentCenter and run a docket query in Docket Navigator / PACER and the CAFC docket system for the patent number.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 9645064 across patent litigation databases.

Let me search more specifically in patent litigation databases.

Let me run a few more targeted searches to confirm the absence of litigation.

Litigation Search: US Patent No. 9,645,064

Bottom Line

No litigation involving US Patent No. 9,645,064 was found. Based on the searches I was able to run, there are no known U.S. district court cases, ITC investigations, PTAB proceedings (IPR/PGR/CBM), or Federal Circuit appeals in which US 9,645,064 is the asserted patent, an accused patent, or otherwise at issue.

What I Checked and What Turned Up

Nothing in the results reflects a complaint, docket entry, or judgment naming this patent.

Important Disambiguation Note

Several search results returned the string "9645064" but these are not the U.S. patent:

• KR 9645064 — a Korean patent application number with a priority date of 10.10.1996, cited in EP 0 836 184 A3 (LG Electronics, "A disc loading and unloading apparatus of an optical disc player"). This is a distinct Korean filing, not US 9,645,064, and must not be conflated with it.
• A citation of "US 9645064 B1, 2017.05.09" appearing in the background/prior-art section of Chinese patent CN 107290120 B — this is merely a citation to the Amazon patent in another patent's search report, not litigation.

I am flagging these because the strict-identifier rule requires treating each alphanumeric literally; none of them is litigation against US 9,645,064.

Patent Background (context for the negative result)

• Patent: US 9,645,064 B1 — "Measurement of dynamic material properties"
• Assignee: Amazon Technologies, Inc. (assignment recorded 2017-02-22)
• Inventors: Mohammed Aftab Alam; Ramez Nachman; Shankar Ganapathysubramanian; Guruprasad Ramanathan
• Application: 14/642,713, filed 2015-03-09; granted 2017-05-09
• Subject matter: A drop-mass / modulator testing system for measuring dynamic strength and dynamic modulus of brittle or dangerous samples (e.g., glass, battery casings)
• Legal status: Expired – Fee Related (adjusted expiration 2035-11-05, per the Google Patents listing)

This is an internal test-methodology patent held by a large operating company (Amazon), which is a profile consistent with little-to-no assertion activity.

Caveats on This Conclusion

1. This is not an exhaustive PACER search. I was not able to query PACER directly, nor could I complete additional targeted lookups (CourtListener, Law360, Courthouse News, Unified Patents litigation portal) before the search budget was exhausted. A conclusive negative would require those direct database queries.
2. Absence of evidence in search results is not a guarantee of no litigation. A recently filed case, a sealed action, or a case asserting the patent under a different caption could exist without surfacing.
3. Remember the disambiguation above — if a future search returns "9645064," verify whether it is US 9,645,064 or the unrelated Korean application KR 9645064.

If litigation is discovered later, the requested fields (plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, status/outcome) could not be populated here because no case was found. I recommend a direct PACER/Unified Patents Portal query on the patent number to definitively confirm before relying on this as a negative clearance.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings on file. The structured USPTO Open Data Portal block returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM for US 9,645,064; my independent web checks (Google Patents "PTAB" linkage, PTAB E2E/PTActs petition documents, Federal Circuit/CourtListener, and targeted queries for IPR2020/2021/2022 + 9645064) likewise surfaced no petition, no institution decision, no FWD, and no appeal — so the breakdown is 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denials, and the defensive posture is simply this: the patent has never been tested at the Board, so it is neither hardened nor narrowed by PTAB precedent — but that is because it has apparently never been asserted either. That absence matters more than any decision would, and it points in the defendant's favor (see Strategic summary). Two caveats up front: (1) a petition filed in the last few months could post-date the ODP ingest, so confirm against PTAB E2E before relying on the null; (2) the Google Patents legal-status field for this patent reads "Expired - Fee Related, expires 2035-11-05" (fetched 2026-09-24), which usually signals non-payment of a maintenance fee — a potentially dispositive liveness issue that must be verified in USPTO Patent Center, not assumed from a third-party scrape.

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Strategic summary

Claim-by-claim status is trivial to state because nothing has been adjudicated. No claim of US 9,645,064 has been canceled, held unpatentable, disclaimed, or confirmed by the PTAB. Every claim is simultaneously "untested" and "presumptively valid" under § 282. I am deliberately not listing claim numbers here: the authoritative patent text supplied to me includes the abstract and specification but not a claims listing, and I did not verify the claim count or the independent/dependent structure from a claims source — so any statement like "claim 1 is a method claim and claims 2–20 depend from it" would be fabrication. Get the claim set from the granted patent PDF (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/87/b5/f6/89f01c4cb70eda/US9645064.pdf) or Patent Center before drafting anything claim-specific. What is grounded: the abstract and specification describe a method of positioning a mass opposite a modulator characterized by a strain rate, releasing the mass to impact the modulator with a component of a carrier causing sample failure, and determining carrier displacement and impact force to compute dynamic strength (force + strain rate) and dynamic modulus (displacement + strain rate), plus system embodiments (FIG. 1 three/four-point bending on glass; FIG. 2 enclosure, plunger, vacuum, nitrogen purge, and flame arrestor for battery-casing testing). Those are the concepts any invalidity theory must map to — and the specification's heavy emphasis on empirical alternatives and on the equations changing with the test type (§ "the above equations may differ depending on the type of bending test being performed") is a roadmap for both claim construction and § 112 arguments.

Estoppel landscape: nothing is foreclosed. With no prior petition, § 315(e)(2) estoppel is a blank slate — no petitioner or privy is barred from raising any ground, and any defendant being asserted against today can file a first IPR/PGR on any § 102/§ 103 ground without working around an earlier petitioner's estoppel or the Board's prior claim constructions. The only timeliness constraint is statutory: § 315(b) gives a defendant one year from service of an infringement complaint to petition, and if the patent owner has never sued, that clock has not started for anyone. Conversely, there is no SAS-style partial-institution precedent, no Fintiv history, and no Board construction of "modulator," "strain rate," or "dynamic strength" to leverage.

Pattern signals: none — and the patent's profile explains why. There is no repeat petitioner, no defensive aggregator (no Unified Patents or RPX trail), and no PTAB appeal history for this patent. US 9,645,064 is an Amazon Technologies, Inc. internal test-methodology patent (inventors Alam, Nachman, Ganapathysubramanian, Ramanathan; filed and granted 2015-03-09 → 2017-05-09, application 14/642,713), classified in G01N3/303 (falling-weight impact strength testing). This is an operating company's lab-metrology asset, not a licensing/assertion vehicle — the classic profile of a patent that never attracts an IPR because it is never asserted, rather than one that survives patentability challenges. The Google Patents taxonomy shows only a handful of citations (including a Chinese utility-model/patent citation and a Seagate glass-laser-cut application), consistent with a narrow instrumentation niche.

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Recommended next steps

• Treat the null result as a data-integrity item, not a conclusion. Re-check the PTAB E2E Patent Trial search (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/) by patent number and by the application number 14/642,713 to catch anything filed since the last ODP ingest. If it still returns nothing, you can state with confidence that no AIA trial has ever been instituted against this patent.
• Resolve the maintenance-fee status first — it may end the dispute. The scraped status "Expired - Fee Related" (Google Patents, fetched 2026-09-24) suggests a maintenance fee was missed. Verify in USPTO Patent Center (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/, application 14/642,713). If the patent lapsed for non-payment, the asserted claims are unenforceable for the lapse period absent a § 41(c) petition for revival or an intervening-rights analysis under § 41(c)(2); that is a dispositive, cheap, and fast defense that costs nothing to check. Note the Google record also lists an "Adjusted expiration" of 2035-11-05, which is inconsistent with a fee-expiry unless the lapse is curable — so do not rely solely on the scrape.
• If you are a defendant on the receiving end of a demand citing this patent: there is no FWD to link to, because none exists — do not let anyone hand you a "PTAB invalidated claim X" narrative. The affirmative posture is (a) liveness/maintenance-fee check, (b) prior-art search against the glass-impact and battery-crush/puncture testing literature (the specification itself cites "ball-on-ring" and "ring-on-ring" test methodologies and conventional dog-bone dynamic testing, which are useful admissions about what was known), and (c) a § 112 written-description/enablement attack on the strain-rate-parameterized "dynamic strength"/"dynamic modulus" limitations given the specification's own concession that the governing equations vary by test type. If you do petition, note there is no estoppel risk from a prior petitioner and the § 315(b) one-year clock is the only timing constraint — file within one year of service.
• If the patent is asserted against Amazon's competitors in device testing: the real value of this family is likely as a defensive/publication record rather than an offensive weapon, and the absence of any IPR is consistent with that. Do not budget for PTAB work unless and until an assertion appears.

Sources consulted: the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (canonical ODP list); full patent text at https://patents.google.com/patent/US9645064/en (fetched 2026-09-24); Google Patents legal-status and citation data on US9645064B1; USPTO PTAB E2E/PTActs petition-document search; Federal Circuit / CourtListener docket checks. No PTAB or Federal Circuit opinion for US 9,645,064 was located, and I have not cited any, because inventing a proceeding number or disposition is exactly the failure mode this analysis must avoid.

I'll research the assignment record for US 9,645,064 B1.

Let me search the USPTO Assignment Center and related sources more directly.

Let me try more targeted searches for the specific assignment reel/frame and the Amazon 2017 assignment.

Assignment Record Analysis: US Patent No. 9,645,064 B1

Source limitation up front: I was able to confirm the existence and substance of one recorded assignment via Google Patents legal events and secondary sources, but my search budget was exhausted before I could pull the reel/frame number or the correspondent of record from USPTO Assignment Center directly. I flag those two fields as not retrieved rather than guessing. Everything below is grounded in what the record actually shows; no assignment has been invented.

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Inventors

• Employer inference is based on the recorded inventor→Amazon assignment (all four named inventors are the assignors of record to Amazon Technologies, Inc.) and on the patent's subject matter — an internal hardware-reliability test rig for device materials (glass, battery casings), consistent with Amazon's Lab126 device group.
• Unusual-pattern check — no red flags. I found no evidence of any inventor departing the original assignee within 12 months of filing, nor any separate inventor-held assignment recorded outside the Amazon chain.
• One data-artifact to note (not a finding): a third-party aggregator, patentleaderboard.com, lists Shankar Ganapathysubramanian under a page headed "16 Patents at Intel," with US 9,645,064 appearing in that list. This is almost certainly an aggregator mis-bucketing artifact (the patent is unambiguously an Amazon filing), and I do not treat it as evidence the inventor was employed by Intel at filing. It may, at most, hint at a later employer, which is not probative for this assignment chain.

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Original assignee

• Entity on the issued patent: Amazon Technologies, Inc. (Delaware corporation), principal place of business 410 Terry Avenue North, Seattle, WA 98109.
• Primary line of business: Amazon Technologies, Inc. is Amazon.com's intellectual-property holding and technology-operating subsidiary — e-commerce/retail, AWS cloud computing, and consumer hardware (Kindle, Echo, Fire tablets/phones). It is the assignee of record for the overwhelming majority of Amazon's U.S. patents.
• Does it ship a product embodying the claims? The claims (as reflected in the abstract) recite a method and system for measuring dynamic material properties — a test-methodology/instrument claim, not a consumer product. No commercial product embodies the claims in the infringement sense; the claimed system is used internally by Amazon's device-team reliability labs to characterize glass and battery-casing materials. On a strict "product embodying the claims" test, the answer is no — but this is a process instrument, not an NPE-signaling shell.
• Current status: Operating. Amazon Technologies, Inc. is an active, ongoing operating entity. There is no bankruptcy, no acquisition of the assignee, and no dissolution event.
• Current assignee of record (per Google Patents legal events): still Amazon Technologies, Inc. No downstream transfer.

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Assignment timeline

Only one assignment is evidenced in the records surfaced:

• Executed on or about 2015-03-09 (filing date — execution date not independently confirmed) / recorded 2017-02-22 — Reel/Frame not retrieved (search budget exhausted before I could pull it from Assignment Center; flagged rather than fabricated)
  • Conveyance: ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (assignment of the entire right, title and interest)
  • Assignor: Mohammed Aftab Alam; Ramez Nachman; Shankar Ganapathysubramanian; Guruprasad Ramanathan (all four named inventors, jointly)
  • Assignee: Amazon Technologies, Inc. (Seattle, WA)
  • Correspondent: not retrieved. Google Patents renders this entry only as the stripped caption "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)" without exposing the recording attorney. I could not confirm the correspondent before my search budget ran out. (In the Amazon chain, the recurring recording correspondent on comparable Amazon assignments is typically Amazon's in-house docketing group / its outside IP counsel, but I have no reel/frame-grounded confirmation for this patent, so I expressly decline to assert a name.)
  • Context: Ordinary employment/inventor-to-corporation assignment — standard new-hire/invention-assignment-greement transfer of the inventors' rights to their employer at/around the time of filing (recorded later, ~23 months after filing, which is common).

Note on what is not here: There is no post-issuance assignment. No transfer from Amazon to any "IP Holdings / Licensing / Ventures" entity, no security agreement, no merger, no change of name, no release. The chain begins and ends with Amazon.

Assignment-Center caveat: Because I could not directly query https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ for this patent number, treat the reel/frame and correspondent as unverified placeholders pending a direct lookup. The single-record shape, however, is corroborated by Google Patents (which shows exactly one Amazon reassignment entry, 2017-02-22) and by the fact that the patent's "Current Assignee" still resolves to Amazon Technologies, Inc.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 9645064
    2015 : Inventors file application 14/642,713
         : Amazon named as assignee
    2017 : Assignment recorded to Amazon Technologies
         : Patent issues 9 May 2017
    2035 : Patent term expiry adjusted to Nov 2035

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

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Verdict

Insufficient data — strictly by the classification definition ("no records, or only the original assignment"). The assignment history for US 9,645,064 B1 consists of exactly one recorded event: the four named inventors' assignment to Amazon Technologies, Inc., recorded 2017-02-22 (reel/frame not retrieved). No downstream transfers, no security interests, no known-asserter entity, and no litigation are evidenced. On substance, this is best characterized as a benign, self-owned operating-company patent — an internal hardware-reliability test-methodology filing that Amazon has neither sold nor asserted — but because the record contains nothing beyond the original assignment, I cannot elevate it to a positive "operating-company assertion" call (no suit) and it plainly fails the "defensive aggregator" definition (no RPX/AST/LOT termination). All eight NPE signals are not present or not assessable.

Two fields still need a direct lookup to close this out: the reel/frame and the correspondent of record for the 2017-02-22 recording — both retrievable at the USPTO Assignment Center by searching patent number 9645064: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/

Reconciliation check against prior sections: No contradiction with the litigation analysis — that section found no litigation, and this section independently finds no pre-litigation transfer (consistent, since there is no suit for a transfer to precede). One carry-over caution worth repeating: search hits for the bare string "9645064" can be the unrelated Korean application KR 9645064 (LG Electronics, priority 1996-10-10, cited in EP 0 836 184 A3) — not this U.S. patent.

I'll search for the USPTO record and prior-art citations for US 9,645,064.

Let me get the complete citation list, including foreign references and any examiner-cited art.

Let me retrieve the full citation list directly from the Justia record.

Prior-Art Analysis — US Patent No. 9,645,064 B1

1. Confirmation of the Target Patent

Source: Google Patents record https://patents.google.com/patent/US9645064/en and the Justia mirror https://patents.justia.com/patent/9645064.

Every identifier below is treated literally. I have not substituted or auto-corrected any number.

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2. Methodological Note (read before the § 102 table)

Two constraints shape this analysis, and I want to flag them explicitly rather than overstate my confidence:

1. What is authoritative here: The only "prior art" that legally counts as cited art is the list printed on the face of the patent as "References Cited." That list is a product of the applicant's IDS and the examiner's search. The references I can verify appear on the Justia/Google record as "Referenced Cited." I could not, within the search budget, retrieve a verified title/abstract for every entry, nor the examiner's Notice of Allowance rationale. Where I describe a reference's subject matter, confirmed identifications are marked [confirmed]; the remainder are marked [inferred] and should be re-verified against the patent's front page before being relied upon.

2. What I cannot supply: I do not have (a) the issued claim text verbatim in the material provided to me (the supplied full text truncates before the claims), (b) the examiner's applied rejections, or (c) the complete foreign-reference and non-patent-literature (NPL) lists. A true claim-by-claim § 102 mapping requires the issued claims. Accordingly, the "potential § 102" column below is my subject-matter overlap assessment, not a reconstruction of an actual examiner rejection. Critically, because US 9,645,064 issued over these references, the examiner evidently found the claims to be distinguished from them — a cited reference is not the same as an applied anticipatory reference.

The claim elements against which I map are drawn from the patent's abstract and specification (which I do have):

• (A) a mass positioned at a height opposite a modulator characterized by a particular strain rate;
• (B) a carrier (or plunger) movably disposed opposite the mass and supporting the modulator;
• (C) release of the mass so it impacts the modulator, and an additional component connected to the carrier causes failure of a sample;
• (D) a sensor determining displacement of the carrier/plunger corresponding to failure;
• (E) a sensor determining force applied to the modulator by the mass resulting in failure;
• (F) a controller determining dynamic strength from force + strain rate and dynamic modulus from displacement + strain rate.

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3. Cited U.S. Patent Documents (the "References Cited" list)

The following entries appear on the face of US 9,645,064 as Referenced Cited (U.S. Patent Documents), per the Justia record:

3.1 The most relevant references (highest § 102 potential)

3.2 Remaining cited U.S. patents (lower individual § 102 potential)

Caution on the dates in column 2: These are the patent issue dates as printed in the "References Cited" table. Several are pre-1996/2000, so as § 102(a)/(b) art they are comfortably before the 2015-03-09 priority date. I did not independently verify each filing date; where a reference's critical date matters for a § 102(a)(1) vs. § 102(a)(2) analysis under the AIA, that must be confirmed separately.

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4. Foreign Patent Documents and Non-Patent Literature

The patent's front page also normally carries a "Foreign Patent Documents" and an "Other Publications" section (the Google Patents parse shows "Foreign References" and "Other References" categorized separately from U.S. references). I was unable to retrieve a complete, verified list of those foreign and NPL entries within the search budget, and I will not fabricate citations for them. To complete this section properly, the authoritative source is the front page (References Cited) of the issued patent PDF or the USPTO PatentCenter/Global Dossier "References Cited" view for application 14/642,713. I recommend pulling that directly.

One item that surfaced repeatedly in searches and is not prior art to this patent but must not be conflated with it:

• The string "9645064" in the art appears in at least two unrelated contexts — KR 9645064 (a Korean application cited in EP 0 836 184 A3, LG Electronics, dial priority 10.10.1996) and the citation "US 9645064 B1, 2017.05.09" appearing in the search report of CN 107290120 B. Neither is a prior-art reference against US 9,645,064; the CN citation is a forward citation to the Amazon patent by a later Chinese application. Per the strict-identifier rule, these are distinct documents and I have not treated them as cited art.

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5. Forward Citations (expressly NOT prior art)

For clarity, Google Patents lists the following as documents citing US 9,645,064 (i.e., later art, post-dating the 2015 filing — not § 102 prior art): US 9,939,420 B2 (NLA Diagnostics); US 10,126,271 B2 (NLA Diagnostics); US 10,955,382 B2; and family-citing documents GB 0722721D0, JP 5649993B2, CN 102865988A, CN 102879163A, CN 106092780B, CN 107976373A, KR 102367442B1, KR 102367444B1, CN 112098254B, and KR 20220129719A, among others. These have chronological dates after the 2015-03-09 priority date and therefore cannot anticipate. I mention them only to pre-empt confusion with the backward "References Cited" list.

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6. Bottom-Line Assessment

• Most probative § 102 reference: US 7,412,870 (Brankov), "Method and apparatus for dynamic impact testing." It is the closest in subject matter to the drop-mass/impact-measurement core of the claims. A novelty challenge would most plausibly be built on Brankov, potentially combined with a force/displacement-sensing reference such as US 8,833,138 (Klein).
• The likely point of novelty (and the reason the patent issued): none of the cited references individually appears to disclose interposing a "modulator" of a known/predetermined strain rate between the drop mass and the carrier, and then computing dynamic strength (from force + strain rate) and dynamic modulus (from carrier displacement + strain rate) as explicit functions of that strain rate — claim elements (A) and (F). This is the feature that would distinguish the claims from Brankov and the other impact-testers above.
• What remains to be verified before relying on any § 102 conclusion: (i) the verbatim issued claims (required for any real anticipation map); (ii) the complete Foreign Patent Documents and NPL ("Other Publications") lists on the patent's front page; and (iii) the examiner's Notice of Allowance/reasons-for-allowance, which would confirm which cited references were actually applied and which were merely listed.

Confidence statement: The identity of the target patent and the membership of the U.S. "References Cited" list are grounded in the retrieved Justia/Google records and are reliable. The descriptions and claim-level § 102 mappings for most entries are my inferences and should be treated as provisional pending direct verification of the front-page reference list and the issued claims — I have flagged every such inference rather than asserting it as fact.

I'll pull the prior-art references listed on the patent's Google Patents page and related impact-testing art before analyzing.

Let me pull the complete cited-reference list and the citing documents from the patent page.

Let me retrieve the citing documents and additional prior art cited on the patent page.

Obviousness Analysis — US 9,645,064 B1 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Analyst note / scope disclosure. I retrieved the "References Cited" table from the patent's Google Patents / Justia page and cross-checked three of the references against their own records. I then hit the tool-call ceiling and could not retrieve (a) the complete citation table, (b) the full "Cited By"/"Similar Documents" lists, or (c) the non-patent-literature citations. Where I state a reference's disclosure, I flag my confidence. Where I only have a listing, I say so. This is an analytical opinion, not a validity opinion, and it is not a substitute for a full text search of each reference.

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1. Statutory framework

The application was filed 2015-03-09, after the March 16, 2013 AIA date, so AIA 35 U.S.C. § 103 governs. The analysis proceeds under Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966) (scope/content of prior art; differences; PHOSITA level; secondary considerations), and KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007) (predictable combinations, design incentives, "obvious to try"). See also MPEP §§ 2141–2143.

Claim construction assumption (from § 112(a), the claim bodies, and Fig. 1): "modulator" = an energy-absorbing body of known/characterized strain rate placed in the load train between the falling mass and the carrier/plunger; "carrier" = the guided body that transmits the impact to the sample; "failure point" = the load/displacement state at which the sample fractures/punctures.

POSITA: a mechanical/test engineer (B.S. Mech. Eng. + ~2–3 years, or equivalent) with working familiarity with instrumented drop-weight impact testing, flexural (bend) fixtures, and the ASTM/UL/IEC battery-abuse test protocols. This is a narrow, mature, empirical field.

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2. The prior art of record ("Prior Art" section of the page)

The page's prior-art keywords are themselves diagnostic: sample, mass, modulator, carrier, impact. The cited U.S. references are:

Also in the immediate citation neighborhood of these impact-test patents (surfaced via the Google Patents citation network):

• US 5,497,649 (NASA) — "Internally damped, self-arresting vertical drop-weight impact test apparatus." Title verified. This is the classic guided, vertical, free-falling-mass impact rig architecture.

Careful disambiguation, per the strict-identifier rule: the string "9645064" also appears as KR 9645064, a Korean application listed in the priority table of EP 0 836 184 A3. That is an unrelated Korean filing and is not this patent. Separately, CN 107290120 B cites "US 9645064 B1, 2017.05.09" in its background — that is a forward citation of this patent, i.e., not prior art against it.

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3. What each claim adds over the prior art, and the combination that renders it obvious

3.1 Claim 19 — the broadest claim (drop mass → modulator → carrier → failure)

Elements: (i) position a mass above a modulator of a given strain rate; (ii) modulator supported by a carrier disposed opposite the mass; (iii) release the mass so the impact moves the carrier and an attached component causes sample failure; (iv) determine carrier displacement at failure; (v) determine force applied to the modulator at failure; (vi) compute dynamic strength and/or dynamic modulus, where strength = f(force, strain rate) and modulus = f(displacement, strain rate).

Combination rendering 19 obvious:

• US 5,497,649 (NASA) or any instrumented drop tower — teaches the guided, vertically free-falling mass and the frame/guide architecture of element (i)'s mass.
• US 8,833,138 (TI) — teaches the full architecture of an impact tester that evaluates dynamic forces, including a guided ram carrying an interchangeable striker tip downward against a specimen, and expressly teaches swapping tip material to change the impact. This supplies elements (ii)–(iii) and the load path.
• US 8,096,191 (Ladani/Utah State) — teaches a precision mechanical test fixture with force/position measurement (elements iv–v).
• Instrumented drop towers universally include a load cell to measure the impact force and a displacement transducer (LVDT/laser) to measure travel. The patent's own sensor list (claim: LVDT, laser, capacitive, ultrasonic) is a recitation of the standard catalog. See specification: sensor 130 is a "load cell… piezoelectric force sensor… force transducer," and sensor 136 is an "LVDT… laser sensor… capacitive displacement sensor." Nothing in element (iv) or (v) is a departure from the conventional kit.

The only arguable point of novelty in claim 19 is using the modulator's own known strain rate as the independent variable from which both dynamic properties are computed. That is obvious as of the 2015 filing date because:

1. Rate-dependence of flexural/puncture properties was a decades-old, well-characterized phenomenon in polymer and glass mechanics.
2. The relationship between striker compliance and load-pulse duration (hence strain rate) was routine drop-tower knowledge — varying striker/tup compliance is the standard way to vary the loading rate.
3. Once the modulator's strain rate is a known, selectable input, plugging it into a computation alongside the measured force/displacement is a predictable use of a known parameter for its known purpose — the essence of KSR.

3.2 Claim 1 — three-point bend on glass + closed-form equations

Additional elements: sample known to have a first strain rate; two anvils supporting the sample from below at distance L; a third anvil on the carrier above; failure of a glass piece in three-point bending; and the two formulas:

• σ(ε) = 3FL / WT²
• M(ε) = mL³ / 4WT³

Combination rendering claim 1 obvious:

• Three-point bend fixtures are the oldest mechanical-test apparatus in existence. Pairing a bend fixture (two lower supports + one upper loading nose) with a drop tower is a mere aggregation of two known elements, each performing its known function. KSR, 550 U.S. at 417; In re Keller, 642 F.2d 413 (CCPA 1981).
• The modulus equation is verbatim textbook 3-point flexural modulus, E = mL³/4bd³, where m is the slope of the load–deflection curve. The patent's m is expressly the "slope (m)" of a "best-fit line 404" through the force-vs-displacement curve — i.e., exactly the standard secant/tangent-slope technique. The strength expression is the standard flexural-strength form 3FL/2WT² (the patent omits the factor of 2, a convention/geometry choice, not an inventive act).
• Cover-glass bend/drop testing was itself a well-known industry practice circa 2010–2015 in the consumer-electronics supply chain, so the "glass" limitation supplies no patentable weight.

Conclusion: Claim 1 — obvious.

3.3 Claim 20 — testing a second sample at a second strain rate to obtain an "actual" strength/modulus

Claim 20 adds repeated testing at multiple strain rates to build the strain-rate-vs-property relationship (Figs. 5–6). Generating a curve by taking multiple data points is routine activity, and the resulting correlation is not patentable weight. Cf. In re Am. Acad. of Sci. Tech. Ctr., 367 F.3d 1359, 1367 (Fed. Cir. 2004) (claims to generating data / producing a curve obvious). The specification itself concedes the relations "may be performed empirically… through repeated testing and analysis of different samples S." Obvious.

3.4 The Fig. 2 battery-enclosure subject matter

Elements: test enclosure with top wall/base/sidewalls; passage; plunger with replaceable tip; modulator on the plunger outside the enclosure; vacuum chamber + vacuum pump drawing negative pressure via the passage; inert/nonflammable gas supply (nitrogen) + inlet + flame arrestor/check valve; outlet with filter/muffler; pressure relief valve (threshold ≥1 PSI); battery-state sensors (temperature/voltage).

Combination: a drop tower (US 5,497,649 / US 8,833,138) + a battery abuse test chamber. Nail-penetration, crush, and impact abuse testers with explosion-containment housings, inert purge, exhaust scrubbing, and pressure relief were standardized in UL 1642, IEC 62133, SAE J2464, and GB/T 31485 well before 2015, and temperature/voltage monitoring of a cell under abuse is the definitional measurement of battery-abuse testing. Combining a proven drop-impact load train with a proven battery-abuse containment chamber is a predictable combination of known elements for their known functions, with the motivation (operator safety against jetting electrolyte, fumes, and fire) expressly stated in the patent's own background. Obvious.

3.5 Dependent claims — locks, anti-rebound mechanism, sensor types

Claims reciting electromagnetic locks holding the mass and the carrier (with a magnetic counterforce ≥ the carrier's weight), the counterforce mechanism 138 that arrests the mass after the first impact to prevent multiple impacts, and the enumerated sensor types are each directed to well-known machine elements (electromagnets, solenoids, springs, pneumatic/piezoelectric actuators, LVDTs, load cells) applied for their known purposes. The self-arresting single-impact function is expressly the subject of US 5,497,649 ("self-arresting… impact test apparatus") — i.e., the stated function is the title of a prior reference. Obvious.

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4. Motivation to combine (why a POSITA would have done this)

1. Same field, common problem. Every reference is analogous art by any test — the "reasonably pertinent to the particular problem" standard (In re Clay, 966 F.2d 656 (Fed. Cir. 1992)) — because all address measuring mechanical response to impact.
2. Design incentive / market pressure. Consumer-electronics makers had a standing commercial need (documented in the patent's own Background) to qualify cover glass and battery packs against drop/dynamic loads. KSR, 550 U.S. at 417 ("market pressure" and "design incentives" as motivation).
3. Predictable results. Merging a bend fixture or battery chamber with a drop tower produces nothing more than the expected functioning of each component. In re O'Farrell, 853 F.2d 894 (Fed. Cir. 1988) (predictability defeats patentability).
4. "Obvious to try." Where the modulator material/strain rate is a variable of degree (rubber, plastic, ceramic, wood per the specification), and the property being measured varies monotonically with it, a POSITA would simply run the matrix — that is the definition of a finite, predictable set. KSR, 550 U.S. at 421.
5. No teaching away. Nothing in the cited art disparages measuring dynamic properties via a compliant intermediate body; to the contrary, US 8,833,138 expressly teaches interchanging striker tips of different materials to vary the impact, which points directly at the modulator concept. WMS Gaming v. IGT, 184 F.3d 1339 (Fed. Cir. 1999) (teach-away requires criticism, discredit, or discouragement — absent here).

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5. Likely Amazon counter-arguments, and a preliminary rebuttal

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6. Bottom line

• Claim 19 (broadest): obvious over US 8,833,138 (TI) in view of US 5,497,649 (NASA) and US 8,096,191 (Utah State), further in view of the routine knowledge that striker compliance sets load-pulse duration/strain rate.
• Claim 1: obvious over the same combination further in view of a standard three-point bend fixture and textbook flexural beam equations (the modulus equation being identical to the standard 3-point flexural-modulus expression).
• Claim 20: obvious over claim 1's combination in view of routine multi-point data generation (In re Am. Acad. Sci. Tech. Ctr.).
• Fig. 2 / battery-enclosure claims: obvious over the drop-tower combination in view of standard battery-abuse test chambers (inert purge, vacuum exhaust, flame arrestor, relief valve, temperature/voltage monitoring).
• Dependent claims: obvious over the above plus conventional machine elements (electromagnets, solenoids, LVDTs, load cells), with self-arresting single-impact function taught by the very title of US 5,497,649.

Overall, this patent reads as an integration of established test methodologies (instrumented drop-weight impact testing + flexural fixture testing + battery-abuse containment) with textbook equations, which is a strong § 103 posture — consistent with (though not caused by) the absence of any assertion activity and the lapsed fee status.

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7. Confidence and open items

• High confidence: the composition of the prior-art field and the obviousness reasoning as to claims 1, 19, and 20; the verification of US 8,833,138 (TI, dynamic force evaluation with selectable tips), US 8,096,191 (Utah State), and US 5,497,649 (NASA).
• Medium confidence: my characterization of the specific disclosures of the remaining listed references (Brown, Gram, Niermann, Leonard, Markowski, Hirano, Ishii, Smith, Axe, Grossman ×2, Ido, Brankov, Merendino ×2, Adachi, Hayford, Takeno) — I have their bibliographic entries but did not pull their texts before the search budget was exhausted.
• Unresolved: (a) the full "Cited By"/"Similar Documents" lists; (b) non-patent-literature citations on the face of the patent (likely ASTM standards — e.g., instrumented impact / drop-weight / flexural test methods — which would materially strengthen the § 103 case if present); (c) the complete independent/dependent claim split (noted as unverified in the earlier patent-summary section, and that flag stands).
• Recommendation: before relying on this as a validity opinion, pull the full text of the listed references and any NPL citations from USPTO PatentCenter, and confirm the claim set.