US 10852214

I'll search for this specific patent number and check for any litigation activity.

Let me check specifically for any USPTO proceedings or litigation involving this patent.

US Patent 10,852,214 — Summary

Important scope note: I searched for this specific number (10852214) plus litigation/PTAB/CAFC terms. I found no record of any CAFC 2026 docket, district‑court case, or PTAB proceeding involving US 10,852,214. Search-engine coverage of court dockets is incomplete, so "none found" is not proof that none exists — but nothing in the results ties this patent to a 2026 Federal Circuit appeal. (The 2026 CAFC items returned were unrelated cases such as Spero v. Mercedes‑Benz, Gamevice/Nintendo, Centripetal v. Cisco, and Defontif v. Hytech — none involves this patent or NuTech Ventures.) Treat that as an open question rather than a firm negative.

Bibliographic data

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10852214/en ; https://patents.justia.com/patent/10852214

Abstract (as issued)

A wind turbine generator fault detection method is described. The method includes obtaining a first signal from a generator of a wind turbine and a second signal from a vibration sensor coupled to the wind turbine, the first signal representing an output current of the generator, and the second signal being a time-sampled signal representing vibrations of a bearing in the wind turbine. A shaft rotation frequency signal is determined from the first signal, representing a time-varying rotational speed of a shaft of the wind turbine. An envelope of the second signal is resampled based on the shaft rotation frequency signal to provide a third signal, the third signal being an angular sampled signal. A fault in the bearing is detected by identifying a characteristic signature of a bearing fault in the third signal.

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

Claim 1 — Wind turbine monitoring system. A processor-plus-memory system that does four things:

1. Gets two signals — a current signal from the wind turbine's generator (representing generator output current) and a vibration signal from a vibration sensor on the turbine (time-sampled bearing vibrations);
2. Derives shaft speed from the current signal — produces a "shaft rotation frequency signal" that tracks the time-varying rotational speed of the shaft;
3. Resamples the vibration envelope into the angular domain — using that shaft-speed signal, it (a) establishes a phase-vs-time relationship between the current-signal time steps and shaft phase, and (b) builds a resampling vector of time points corresponding to constant shaft phase increments, producing an angular-sampled third signal;
4. Detects a bearing fault by recognizing a characteristic bearing-fault signature in that angular-sampled signal.

Claim 14 — Computer-readable storage device. A non-transitory machine-readable medium storing instructions that, when executed, cause a processor to carry out the same core sequence as claim 1 (obtain generator-current and vibration signals → derive shaft rotation frequency signal → angularly resample the vibration envelope → detect a bearing fault indicator). It is a hardware-medium counterpart to the system claim.

Claim 15 — Method. A wind-turbine generator fault-detection method executed by at least one processor: obtain the generator output-current signal and the vibration-sensor signal; determine the shaft rotation frequency signal (time-varying shaft speed) from the current signal; resample an envelope of the vibration signal based on that shaft frequency signal to yield an angular-sampled third signal; and detect a fault based on analysis of the third signal.

Typical dependent limitations add: time‑frequency‑domain fundamental‑frequency estimation (e.g., max of a time‑frequency distribution) to get shaft speed; computing shaft speed from the current fundamental frequency using generator pole count; Hilbert‑transform envelope extraction; oversampling the envelope above the vibration sampling rate relative to the gy, and; generating an order‑domain representation (e.g., via FFT), converting the order domain back to the frequency domain using a selected reference shaft speed; identifying the type of fault (inner‑race, outer‑race, cage‑relative‑to‑outer‑ring, cage‑relative‑to‑inner‑ring); and displaying fault data to a user.

Caveats / uncertainty

• The claim text supplied in the authoritative source is truncated mid‑claim 8, so my description of dependent claims 9–20 is drawn from the specification's summary language and cross‑checks against the sibling US 11,519,821 claim set. Those dependent‑claim specifics should be verified against the USPTO PatentCenter claim listing before being relied on.
• Note a deliberate distinction: the '214 patent is bearing‑specific (claim 1 recites "detecting a fault in the bearing… characteristic signature of a bearing fault"). The continuation US 11,519,821 broadens this to "vibrations of a component" and "detecting a fault in the wind turbine," listing bearing, gearbox, generator, or shaft faults. Do not conflate the two when reading claim scope.
• No litigation/PTAB/CAFC‑2026 activity located for 10,852,214 in these searches; confirm via USPTO PatentCenter, PACER, and the CAFC docket if this matters to your analysis.

I'll search litigation databases for US 10,852,214.

Initial searches surfaced no litigation hits. Let me run more targeted queries against litigation-specific sources.

Let me do a final round of checks against litigation-specific databases.

Litigation Report — U.S. Patent No. 10,852,214

Patent: U.S. 10,852,214 B2 — "Detecting faults in wind turbines"
Application: 15/985,226 (filed 2018-05-21) | Priority: 2017-05-19 (Provisional 62/508,803)
Patentee/Assignee of record: NuTech Ventures, Inc. (originally Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska; inventors Wei Qiao, Jun Wang, Liyan Qu)
Government interest: DOE Grant DE-EE0006802; NSF Grant ECCS1308045

Bottom line

No litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 10,852,214 was identified in any publicly indexed source. I found no district court complaints, no ITC Section 337 investigations, no declaratory judgment actions, and no PTAB post-grant proceedings (IPR/PGR/CBM) in which the '214 patent is the patent-in-suit or otherwise at issue.

Because no case exists, I cannot provide plaintiff(s), defendant(s), jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome — supplying any such details would require fabrication.

Sources consulted and why the result is negative

Notably, the results returned several documents for other, unrelated patent numbers that I deliberately did not conflate with the '214 patent (per the instruction to interpret identifiers literally and not auto-correct). Examples that surfaced but are not litigation involving US 10,852,214:

• Facet Tech. Corp. v. Mobileye Glob., Inc., No. 2:24-cv-00058 (E.D. Tex.) — concerns a "'328 Patent"
• Intertrust Technologies Corp. v. (various) — concerns a "'106 patent"
• Medtronic v. Axonics Modulation Techs., No. 8:19-cv-02115-DOC-JDE (C.D. Cal.) — concerns Medtronic's neurostimulation patents

Related context that bears on assertion risk

The '214 patent is part of a NuTech Ventures wind-turbine diagnostics family. None of these family members appears in indexed litigation either, based on the returned results:

• US 10,359,473 B2 — "Detecting faults in turbine generators" (Qiao & Gong; filed 2015-10-15; granted 2019-07-23)
• US 10,591,519 B2 — "Detecting faults in wind turbines" (Qiao & Gong; filed 2013-05-29; granted 2020-03-17)
• US 11,519,821 B2 — "Detecting faults in wind turbines" (continuation, app. 17/107,505, filed 2020-11-30; granted 2022-12-06; stated expiration 2038-07-14)

The '214 patent's own legal status on Google Patents is shown as Active, adjusted expiration 2039-04-01, with ownership chain: inventors → Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska → NuTech Ventures → confirmatory license to the U.S. Department of Energy. This is a university technology-transfer portfolio, which is consistent with the absence of any assertion campaign on record.

Important caveats on this negative finding

1. Not a clearance opinion. A negative search is not proof that no suit was ever filed. My search was limited to publicly indexed web sources.
2. Paywalled/proprietary dockets not directly queried. Docket Navigator, RPX Insight, Patexia, Lex Machina, and Unified Patents' full litigation caselist require authenticated access and were not directly searchable here. These are the definitive sources and should be run before relying on this conclusion.
3. PACER/CAFC direct access not available in this session. I could not run a party-name docket query on PACER (e.g., "NuTech Ventures" as plaintiff) or an appeal search at the Federal Circuit.
4. Recency lag. Recently filed complaints (particularly seal-pending filings) may not yet be indexed.

Recommended verification steps if you need a defensible, of-record answer:

• Run a party-name search in Docket Navigator / Lex Machina / RPX for "NuTech Ventures" and "Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska" as plaintiff, filtered to patents asserted.
• Run a PACER "party" search in the District of Nebraska and E.D. Tex./W.D. Tex./D. Del. (common venues for university and NPE assertions).
• Run a PTAB search on Patent Trial and Appeal Board End-to-End (P-TACTS) for US 10,852,214 as the challenged patent.
• Check CAFC docket for any appeal involving the '214 patent or its family.

If you'd like, I can draft the specific queries to hand to a Docket Navigator or Lex Machina analyst, or draft a formal "no known litigation" declaration paragraph suitable for a validity/patentability opinion or an IDS transmittal.

PTAB / AIA Trial Activity — U.S. Patent No. 10,852,214

Patent: U.S. 10,852,214 B2 — "Detecting faults in wind turbines"
Patent Owner: NuTech Ventures (assignee; University of Nebraska–Lincoln tech-transfer entity)
Inventors: Wei Qiao, Jun Wang, Liyan Qu
Application: 15/985,226 · Filed: 2018-05-21 · Priority: 2017-05-19 · Granted: 2020-12-01
Adjusted expiration: 2039-04-01 (Google Patents legal status: Active)
Claims: 20 (claims 1–14 system / CRM; claims 15–20 method)
Source of record: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US10852214](/patent/US10852214)/en

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0. No inter partes review, post-grant review, or covered business method review has been filed against U.S. 10,852,214 — the USPTO Open Data Portal returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent as of the most recent ingest, and independent web searching (PTAB dockets, free-law PTAB decision repositories, Docket Alarm, Federal Circuit filings) surfaced no petition, institution decision, Final Written Decision, or appeal naming this patent. The first public AIA trial record for this patent, if any, will not exist until a petition is served and docketed.

Because there are no proceedings to analyze, the breakdown is trivially: active 0 / claims invalidated 0 / claims sustained 0 / settled 0 / institution denied 0 — all 20 claims remain exactly as issued.

Bottom-line defensive posture: All 20 claims of the '214 patent carry zero PTAB history — no claim has been canceled, narrowed, disclaimed, or judicially construed by the Board. A defendant cannot point to a canceled claim and say "the troll has no case," and equally cannot point to a survived IPR and say "this is hardened." The patent is, from the PTAB's perspective, completely untested. Every validity challenge is still available, offensively untouched by § 315(e) estoppel, and unconstrained by any Board claim construction or institution-stage merits finding.

Proceedings

None. There is no proceeding to report. To avoid planting false anchors, I am not listing placeholder docket numbers.

Two false positives you should not rely on

1. IPR2013-00101 (Norman Noble, Inc. v. NuTech Ventures, U.S. Patent 6,489,589). NuTech Ventures appears as Patent Owner in this 2013 proceeding, with Mandatory Notices filed 2013-01-17 listing NUtech Ventures v. Norman Noble, Inc., No. 1:12-cv-02326 (N.D. Ohio) as a related litigation. This is a different, unrelated patent (not wind-turbine related, not in the '214 family). Any "NuTech has been through IPR" search hit is about this patent, not the '214.
2. NuTech's related wind-turbine family. Google Patents family data for the sibling continuation U.S. 2021/0108988 / U.S. 11,519,821 lists U.S. 10,359,473 ("Detecting faults in turbine generators") and U.S. 10,591,519 ("Detecting faults in wind turbines") as related family members. I found no AIA trial against those patents either, but if you are clearing freedom to operate on the wind-turbine condition-monitoring space, screen the whole family — the '821 continuation in particular recites broader subject matter (claim 1 covers vibrations of "a component" and claim 12 enumerates bearing, gearbox, generator, or shaft faults), so an IPR on the '214 alone would not clear the family.

Strategic summary

Claim status — all claims UNTESTED. Claims 1–20 of U.S. 10,852,214 have never been before the Board. Nothing is canceled; nothing has been held patentable over art. Independent claim 1 (system), independent claim 14 (non-transitory CRM), and independent claim 15 (method) all stand in their as-issued form, and the as-issued claim 1 includes the specific angular-resampling architecture: determining a shaft rotation frequency signal from generator output current, resampling an envelope of the vibration signal, specifically "determining, based on the shaft rotation frequency signal, a phase-time relationship between time steps of the shaft rotation frequency signal and phases of the shaft" and "generating, based on the phase-time relationship, a resampling vector of time points representing constant phase increments of the shaft." That is a fairly narrow, hardware-signal-processing-specific claim ladder, which is consistent with the absence of IPRs — narrow claims attract fewer petitions and less litigation. The patent is also explicitly directed at detecting faults in variable-speed direct-drive wind turbines using generator stator current as the speed reference, which is a comparatively small commercial target set.

Estoppel landscape — a clean slate. Because no IPR or PGR was ever instituted, § 315(e)(2) estoppel does not attach to anyone with respect to this patent. There is no petitioner, no privy, and no ground that was "raised or reasonably could have been raised" at the Board. That means a present-day defendant has the full menu available: § 102/§ 103 IPRs on patents and printed publications (subject only to the ordinary § 315(b) one-year bar running from service of a complaint and the § 311(b) printed-publication limitation), § 112 challenges in district court and before the examiner, and § 101 challenges. Critically, a defendant who files an IPR on the '214 today would be creating the first estoppel in the patent's history, not inheriting one — so it can pick its single best ground without worrying that a prior petitioner already burned the art. Likewise, if you are asserting the patent, there is no adverse Board construction to work around.

Pattern signals — thin, and consistent with non-assertion. Three data points all cut the same way: (1) no IPR, PGR, or CBM ever filed in the ~5 years since the 2020-12-01 grant; (2) the PGR window closed 2021-09-01 (nine months post-grant) with no filing; (3) CBM review was never available — the transitional program sunset on 2020-09-16 for patents issued on or after that date, and this patent issued 2020-12-01. Independent searching also surfaced no district court infringement action asserting the '214. No repeat petitioner exists. No defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, or similar) appears in the chain. The owner is a university tech-transfer entity (NuTech Ventures, affiliated with the University of Nebraska–Lincoln), and the patent is encumbered by government interests — the specification states it was made with U.S. Department of Energy support under Grant No. DE-EE0006802 and National Science Foundation support under Grant No. ECCS1308045, and the Google Patents assignment record shows a confirmatory license to the United States Department of Energy effective 2020-12-01. Non-practicing university ownership with federal funding and no IPR history is the classic profile of a licensing-only asset rather than a serial-litigation asset.

Recommended next steps

If you are analyzing this patent defensively:

• Do not represent to a client that any claim of the '214 has been invalidated. It has not. There is no FWD to link, no cancellation certificate to cite, and no Board construction to lean on. If an opposing brief or demand letter implies otherwise, that implication is unsupported.
• Verify the absence yourself, because the ODP ingest can lag and a recently filed petition may not yet be indexed. Search PTAB E2E / the PTAB case search by patent number (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptabweb/#/search) and cross-check the free decision repositories. The structured ODP result of "no proceedings" is the authoritative baseline; treat a subsequent contrary hit as breaking news rather than a correction.
• Note the § 315(b) clock: if your client is served with a complaint alleging infringement of the '214, the one-year bar to filing an IPR begins to run on the date of service. Because no prior petitioner exists, the full prior-art universe — including the extensive non-patent literature the inventors themselves cite (IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics work by Qiao, Gong, Lu, and others on wind-turbine condition monitoring and current-based mechanical fault detection) — remains available. That literature is a natural § 102/§ 103 wellspring precisely because it is printed publication art and because the named inventor's own pre-2017 publications are candidates under § 102(b).
• Screen the sibling patents (U.S. 10,359,473, U.S. 10,591,519, U.S. 11,519,821) alongside the '214. The '821 continuation, filed 2020-11-30 and granted 2022-12-06, has a broader claim 1 (any "component" of the wind turbine) and is the more likely assertion vehicle going forward, even though it too shows no PTAB activity.

If you are analyzing this patent offensively (for the owner):

• The claims are as-issued and unconstrained, but also un-adjudicated. NuTech has never had a Board or district court confirm validity, and the '214's independent claims carry the specific phase-time/resampling-vector limitations that an accused infringer will attack as disclosed by the applicant's own published prior work. Commission a validity study against Qiao et al.'s pre-2017 IEEE papers before any assertion campaign.

On the absence of PTAB activity as a signal: well-asserted patents reliably attract IPRs — the median aggressively enforced software or mechanical patent sees at least one petition within a few years of first assertion. Zero petitions in five years, coupled with no locatable infringement suit asserting the '214, is a strong (though circumstantial) indicator that the patent has not been actively litigated in the U.S. Treat it as an inference about assertion behavior, not as evidence of invalidity.

Constraints observed: no proceeding numbers, FWD dispositions, judge panels, settlement terms, or Federal Circuit dockets are asserted because none exist for this patent. Where sources conflict on anything family-related, the authoritative patent text supplied in this prompt controls. Date format is YYYY-MM-DD throughout.

I'll verify the assignment record and check for any litigation/NPE signals before writing this up.

Let me check for litigation activity and any teardown/NPE directory entries involving NuTech Ventures.

Let me try to pull the specific assignment entries (reel/frame and correspondent) from USPTO-derived sources.

Ownership & Assignment Analysis — US 10,852,214 B2

Verification caveat up front (read this before relying on the timeline):
The authoritative USPTO Assignment Center record at https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ is the source of truth for reel/frame, correspondent of record, and execution dates. In this session I was able to confirm the existence and parties of the recorded events via the Google Patents legal‑events ledger (https://patents.google.com/patent/US10852214/en) and corroborating public sources, but I could not retrieve the reel/frame numbers, execution dates, or the correspondent of record for the individual instruments. Those fields are therefore marked [NOT RETRIEVED] rather than guessed. Do not treat any bracket below as a recorded value. Everything else is grounded in the citations given.

Inventors

Unusual‑pattern check: No unusual pattern. All three are UNL‑affiliated and none appears to have departed the institution in connection with this filing. The inventor→university assignment is a single instrument recorded 2018‑10‑26 covering all three inventors jointly — the normal academic Bayh‑Dole pattern, not a fractured‑rights or fire‑sale pattern. The patent carries a federally sponsored research statement (DOE Grant DE‑EE0006802; NSF Grant ECCS1308045), which independently corroborates that the invention originated in university research rather than in a standalone commercial venture. (Inventor employer identifications other than the assignor listing are from my own knowledge of the UNL ECE group and are flagged as such — verify independently.)

Original assignee

NuTech Ventures, Inc. (Lincoln, Nebraska) — named as original assignee in the patent's front matter and current assignee. Corroborated address from a parallel NUtech filing: "Lincoln, Nebraska 68508 (US)" (EPO publication server, EP3765590, applicant "NUtech Ventures").

• Primary line of business: Not an operating company. NuTech Ventures is the nonprofit technology‑commercialization affiliate of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln — it takes assignment of UNL inventor rights, patents them, and licenses them. Its own FY23 metrics page describes license revenue, license agreements, and royalty distributions to inventors and colleges (https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=nutechpub).
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? No. NuTech Ventures does not manufacture wind turbines, generators, or condition‑monitoring hardware. It is a licensor.
• Current status: Operating (active TTO; the FY23 metrics show ongoing licensing activity and ~115 patents filed / 31 issued in that year). The patent itself is Active with an adjusted expiration of 2039‑04‑01 per Google Patents — i.e., maintenance fees are being paid, so this asset is being deliberately maintained.
• Family note: NuTech also holds the continuation US 11,519,821 B2 ("Detecting Faults in Wind Turbines," same three inventors; listed on the NUtech publication list and shown in the Google Patents ledger as "Priority to US17/107,505" on 2020‑11‑30). The family is being expanded and maintained, not wound down.

Assignment timeline

The chain is short: inventors → Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska → NuTech Ventures, plus one government confirmatory instrument. Reel/frame and correspondent are [NOT RETRIEVED] for all entries — flagged for follow‑up at the Assignment Center.

• 2018‑08‑07 (recorded) — Reel [NOT RETRIEVED]

  • Conveyance: Confirmatory License (Google Patents: "CONFIRMATORY LICENSE (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)")
  • Assignor: University of Nebraska Lincoln
  • Assignee: United States Department of Energy
  • Correspondent: [NOT RETRIEVED]
  • Context: Bayh‑Dole confirmatory instrument perfecting the federal government's march‑in/license rights (DOE Grant DE‑EE0006802) — a license, not a transfer of title.

• 2018‑10‑26 (recorded) — Reel [NOT RETRIEVED]

  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
  • Assignor: QIAO, Wei; QU, Liyan; WANG, Jun
  • Assignee: Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
  • Correspondent: [NOT RETRIEVED]
  • Context: Inventor→university assignment — standard academic title transfer at filing.

• 2018‑10‑26 (recorded) — Reel [NOT RETRIEVED]

  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
  • Assignor: Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
  • Assignee: NuTech Ventures
  • Correspondent: [NOT RETRIEVED]
  • Context: Internal reorg — transfer from the university's governing board to its own commercialization affiliate. Same‑day recording with the prior entry indicates a single coordinated filing package.

• 2019‑08‑14 (recorded) — Reel [NOT RETRIEVED]

  • Conveyance: Assignment (Google Patents lists it as "reassignment"; instrument type not verified)
  • Assignor: Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
  • Assignee: NuTech Ventures
  • Correspondent: [NOT RETRIEVED]
  • Context: Internal reorg / corrective or duplicate recording — same assignor and assignee as the 2018‑10‑26 entry, ~10 months later. Common where the first instrument had a typo, missing signature, or an unrecorded inventor. This is the one entry most worth pulling the actual instrument for, because a corrective recording can mask a change in the underlying instrument.

Number of recorded post‑issuance title transfers to third parties: zero. There is no assignment out of the NuTech/Board of Regents family anywhere in the record.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10852214
    2017 : Provisional application filed May 19
    2018 : Non-provisional filed May 21
         : DOE confirmatory license recorded Aug 7
         : Inventors assign to Board of Regents
         : Board of Regents assigns to NuTech Ventures
    2019 : Second NuTech recording Aug 14
    2020 : Patent US10852214 issued Dec 1
         : Continuation family US11519821 filed

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — NOT PRESENT.
The 2018‑10‑26 Board of Regents → NuTech Ventures transfer is to an entity whose name ends in "Ventures," which trips the naming heuristic — but the concrete indicia are absent. NuTech is the nonprofit UNL commercialization affiliate with a Lincoln, NE university address (EPO EP3765590 lists "Lincoln, Nebraska 68508"), a decades‑long operating history, real licensing staff, and public license‑revenue reporting (https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=nutechpub). That is not a single‑member Delaware/Texas LLC at a registered‑agent address. Naming alone is not a finding, per your constraint.

2. Known asserter in the chain — NOT PRESENT.
Neither Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska nor NuTech Ventures appears on the enumerated lists (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi‑LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation, Spangenberg entities). However, note the analog: NuTech has asserted university patents in litigation as plaintiff — NUtech Ventures v. Syngenta Seeds, Inc., No. 8:12‑cv‑00289 (D. Neb., filed 2012‑08‑15) and NUtech Ventures v. Gruma Corp., No. 4:12‑cv‑03137 (D. Neb., filed 2012‑07‑05). Those suits involved different patents ('592 and '828, agricultural biotech), a decade before this patent issued, and are consistent with ordinary university technology‑transfer enforcement — not a match to any listed NPE. No suit has ever named US 10,852,214.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNCLEAR (data not retrieved).
This is the one signal I cannot close out. The correspondent of record is the single most diagnostic field here, and it was not retrievable from the sources available in this session. Action item: pull the four recorded instruments at the Assignment Center; if one attorney/firm appears as correspondent on the 2018‑10‑26 inventor assignment, the 2018‑10‑26 Board→NuTech assignment, and the 2019‑08‑14 recording, that would be a routine single‑counsel TTO practice (not an NPE tell) — the signal only bites if the same correspondent also recurs on outbound NPE‑chain filings. Nothing in the retrieved record flags a recurrence, so I am recording unclear, not present.

4. Cascading transfers — NOT PRESENT.
Only one substantive title transfer (Board of Regents → NuTech). The 2019‑08‑14 entry is a recording of the same assignor/assignee pair, not a new downstream hop. No chained LLCs, no <24‑month daisy chain through multiple buyers.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT.
No infringement suit has ever named US 10,852,214, so there is no transfer within 6 months before a first suit. Nothing to time against.

6. Bankruptcy fire‑sale — NOT PRESENT.
No Chapter 7/11 proceeding involving UNL, the Board of Regents, or NuTech Ventures. The patent is still active and fee‑paid (expiration adjusted to 2039‑04‑01), the opposite of an abandoned fire‑sale asset.

7. Privateering — NOT PRESENT.
No operating‑company→NPE transfer that then asserts on the operating company's behalf. The assignor (Board of Regents) is a nonprofit; there is no commercial sponsor whose competitors would be the target set.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti‑NPE) — NOT PRESENT.
The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. It terminates at NuTech Ventures, which is a licensing/enforcement‑capable holder, not a defensive aggregator.

Verdict

Defensive / non-asserting (closest applicable bucket — with an explicit caveat)

Justification. The complete retrieved chain — DOE confirmatory license recorded 2018‑08‑07, inventor→Board of Regents assignment and Board of Regents→NuTech Ventures assignment both recorded 2018‑10‑26, and a same‑party re‑recording on 2019‑08‑14 — shows a self‑contained university technology‑transfer path with zero transfers out of the UNL family, zero NPE‑checklist signals present, and no assertion activity against this patent in the ~6 years since issuance. NuTech Ventures is a nonprofit university commercialization affiliate at a Lincoln, NE campus address with published licensing operations, not a registered‑agent shell; per your constraints, the "Ventures" name alone is not a finding. The caveat: NuTech is not an RPX/AST/LOT/Unified aggregator, and it has litigated other university patents (Syngenta, Gruma 2012) — so this bucket should be read as "non‑asserting, university‑owned asset," not "neutralized by a defensive aggregator."

Confidence: Moderate, and it is capped by a real data gap rather than by ambiguity in the chain. I could not retrieve reel/frame, execution dates, or the correspondent of record, so signal #3 (repeat correspondent) is genuinely unresolved, and the 2019‑08‑14 re‑recording should be read in full to rule out a corrective instrument masking a substantive change. If the correspondent on the 2019‑08‑14 instrument turns out to be an NPE‑chain filing firm, revisit this call.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ — search patent number 10852214 (mirror: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html). Legal‑events ledger: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10852214/en. Litigation analog (different patents): https://dockets.justia.com/docket/nebraska/nedce/8:2012cv00289/59910 and https://dockets.justia.com/docket/nebraska/nedce/4:2012cv03137/59468.

I'll research the prior-art citations of US 10,852,214 directly, focusing on the patent's own citation records.

Let me pull the actual citation lists — both the examiner-cited (US) and the applicant's other-publications — for the '214 patent specifically.

Let me try to retrieve the '214 patent's own front-page reference list directly.

Important data-sourcing note (read first)

I was able to retrieve the family's "References Cited" list with certainty for the continuation US 11,519,821 B2 (which states on its face that it is a "[c]ontinuation of application No. 15/985,226, filed on May 21, 2018, now Pat. No. 10,852,214" — i.e., the '214 is its parent). That continuation shares the '214's specification, inventors (Qiao / Wang / Qu), and primary examiner (John H. Le). In this session I could not directly load the '214 patent's own front-page citation list — Google Patents renders that section dynamically and the searches returned the specification text but not the citation table.

So: the list below is the as-printed "References Cited" of US 11,519,821 B2 (family member), which is my best evidence for the prior art of record in this family. I am flagging this explicitly rather than presenting it as the verified front page of the '214. Treat the specific '214 front-page list as needing confirmation against the '214 PDF / USPTO PatentCenter. I have not invented any reference — every item below appeared in a retrieved source.

Source for the list: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/99/df/5e/6798729f70f6c3/US11519821.pdf (front-page "(56) References Cited"), confirmed against the Justia pending-file citation cross-references.

A. Cited U.S. patent documents

Citations are reproduced literally as retrieved (including OCR artifacts like "Lecb", "Thuke", "Falo", "Heiberington"), per the no-auto-correct rule. Where a name is obviously an OCR corruption I say so but do not substitute.

B. Cited non-patent literature (the technically load-bearing citations)

(The retrieved "Other Publications" list was truncated after item N5; additional references — e.g., Combet/Randall-class works and possibly the inventors' own Wang/Peng/Qiao 2016 paper — may also be listed. I did not see them in the retrieved text and will not invent them.)

One reference you should look for specifically and that I could NOT confirm is on the '214 front page: J. Wang, Y. Peng, and W. Qiao, "Current-Aided Order Tracking of Vibration Signals for Bearing Fault Diagnosis of Direct-Drive Wind Turbines," IEEE Trans. Industrial Electronics, 63(10): 6336-6346 (2016) (verified as existing via puma.ub.uni-stuttgart.de). This is the inventors' own paper and is technically almost identical to the '214 disclosure. If cited, it is a §102(a)(1) candidate subject to the §102(b)(1)(A) inventor-grace-period exception (published 2016, within one year before the 2017-05-19 priority). Confirm from the '214 PDF before relying on it.

C. Anticipation (§102) assessment

Bottom line: I found no cited reference that anticipates independent claims 1, 14, or 15 as a single §102 reference.

The independent claims require, in combination:

1. obtain generator output current signal and vibration-sensor signal;
2. derive the shaft rotation frequency signal from the current signal;
3. resample the envelope of the vibration signal using that signal, including determining a phase-time relationship and generating a constant-phase-increment resampling vector; and
4. detect a bearing fault from a characteristic signature in the resulting angular-sampled signal.

The cited art splits this combination:

• N4 (Bonnardot) supplies the angular-resampling/order-tracking machinery but takes its reference from an acceleration signal, not generator current.
• N5 (Borghesani) supplies variable-speed envelope analysis of bearings but not the current-derived resampling reference.
• N3 (Blodt/Bidott) supplies stator-current bearing diagnostics but, as the '214 itself stresses, uses current for signature extraction — the '214 uses current only as a speed reference for order tracking.
• N2 (Amirat) supplies amplitude demodulation in wind turbines.
• The Hedin / Kikuchi / Bechhoefer items supply wind-turbine or bearing condition-monitoring context.

Each is therefore a §103 obviousness candidate, not a §102 anticipation. Claim-by-claim, the most defensible §102-style mappings are weak and conditional:

• Claim 1 / 14 / 15 (resampling + phase-time + constant-phase-increment vector): closest = N4. Anticipation fails on the reference-signal source (vibration/acceleration vs. generator current).
• Claim 1, 14, 15 (envelope resampling): closest = N5 / N2. Anticipation fails on current-derived shaft speed.
• Claim 1 / 14 / 15 (identifying a bearing-fault characteristic signature): closest = N3 / #18 (Bechhoefer). Anticipation fails on the upstream current-aided resampling.
• Dependent claims 2–4 (time-frequency fundamental-frequency estimation; pole-count conversion): not addressed by any single cited reference found. (N3's current-based diagnosis is the nearest analogue.)
• Claims 11–13-type (order-domain FFT, conversion to frequency domain with a reference shaft frequency): N4 is the nearest, on the order-tracking theory, not on the current-aided implementation.

The practical significance: the '214 issued over this art, so the examiner evidently did not treat any item as anticipatory of claims 1/14/15. The real invalidity risk in this list is §103 (e.g., N4 or N5 in view of N3), plus the §102/§103 risk from the inventors' own 2016 Wang/Peng/Qiao paper, which is a grace-period question, not a conventional reference question.

D. Downstream citation of the '214 (for completeness — not §102 art against itself)

• US 11,519,821 B2 — continuation; its own claim set lists US 10,852,214 as a cited reference.
• WO 2023/065580 A1 (PCT/CN2022/077779) — cites US 10,852,214 B2 (NuTech Ventures), 2020-12-01 as Category "A" prior art against claims 1–17 (source: patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/47/bb/35/630775117ab9ec/WO2023065580A1.pdf).
• US 11,460,006 B2 and US 12,253,432 list 10852214 (Qiao, 2020-12-01) among references cited.
• pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov patent record for US-2012299305-A1 lists US-10852214-B2 (APP) as a "Cited By."

E. Explicit caveats

1. Sourcing: The reference tables above are the as-printed list of the '821 continuation, not a directly-verified '214 front page. Confirm the '214's own list from its PDF / PatentCenter.
2. Descriptions: For references I could not read in this session, I wrote "not verified" rather than guessing a disclosure. Do not treat a blank description as a substantive finding.
3. OCR names: "Lecb", "Bidott", "Thuke", "Falo", "Heiberington", "McGrahl" are reproduced verbatim from the source and not auto-corrected.
4. Numbering conflict flagged: US 10,591,819 (from the '821 front page) vs. US 10,591,519 (from the earlier litigation section of this record). These are printed literally and not reconciled.
5. §102 vs §103: My mapping is analytical. Anticipation requires a single reference disclosing every element; on the record I retrieved, none does for claims 1/14/15.

Would you like me to (a) draft the exact query to pull the '214's own front-page citation table from PatentCenter/Espacenet, or (b) build the element-by-element §103 chart, e.g., Bonnardot (N4) + Blodt (N3) against claim 1?

I'll research the prior art landscape relevant to this patent's claims before building the § 103 analysis.

Let me verify a few key prior-art references from the patent's own "References Cited" list so I can characterize them accurately.

Obviousness Analysis Under 35 U.S.C. § 103

U.S. Patent No. 10,852,214 B2 — "Detecting Faults in Wind Turbines"

0. Source note and a correction to the earlier sections

The prior-art record I am working from is the "References Cited" and "Prior art keywords" material on the Google Patents page for US 10,852,214 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US10852214/en) plus the cross-checked reference list on uspto.report (https://uspto.report/patent/grant/10852214). The page does not itself contain a USPTO examiner's §103 rejection — it lists the references of record (all marked "cited by applicant"). So this is a self-constructed validity/obviousness analysis built on that reference set, not a reproduction of an examiner's rejection. I say that up front so the provenance is clear.

Correction to the previously generated "Patent summary" section — flagging a contradiction as instructed. That section states: "Claims: 20 (3 independent: claims 1, 14, 15)." The authoritative claim text I now have (uspto.report and the Google Patents claim listing) shows this is wrong:

• Claim 14 is dependent — "The system of claim 1, wherein the operations further comprise providing, for display to a user, data indicating the fault…"
• Claim 15 is independent and is the non-transitory computer-readable storage device claim.
• Claim 16 is independent and is the method claim.

So the three independent claims are 1, 15, and 16 — not 1, 14, 15. The earlier section's statement that "claim 15 is the method" is also transposed (claim 15 is the storage device; claim 16 is the method). This does not change the substance of the analysis, because claims 15 and 16 are substantively coextensive with claim 1, but the numbering should be corrected going forward.

Also note the earlier "Patent summary" described claim 14 as the storage-device claim, which is likewise incorrect.

1. Governing law, effective filing date, and POSITA

Applicable regime. The application (15/985,226) was filed May 21, 2018, and claims priority only to provisional 62/508,803 filed May 19, 2017 — both after March 16, 2013. The AIA version of §§ 102/103 governs. Reference dates should be measured against the May 19, 2017 effective filing date.

Person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA). Based on the field (wind-turbine condition monitoring; electrical-machine diagnostics; vibration signal processing) and the cited art, the POSITA here would be a person with an M.S. or Ph.D. in electrical or mechanical engineering (or equivalent), with 2–4 years' experience in rotating-machine fault diagnosis, including knowledge of (i) order tracking/angular resampling, (ii) envelope (amplitude-demodulation) analysis of rolling-element bearings, (iii) instantaneous-frequency estimation from non-stationary signals, and (iv) generator stator-current signature analysis. This is the level that the applicant's own Background and reference list assume.

Applicant's own admissions in the specification. The Background and Detailed Description expressly concede as known: (a) that "vibration monitoring has been widely recognized as one of the most popular, effective, and reliable methods for bearing condition monitoring and fault diagnosis"; (b) that "order tracking … convert[s] a signal with a constant time increment into a signal with a constant phase increment via angular resampling"; (c) that IFE can be done by "phase-based and time-frequency distribution (TFD)-based methods"; and (d) the bearing characteristic-frequency formulas (Eq. 21–25) and the standard envelope analysis. These admissions supply much of the motivation and several of the elements independently of any specific reference.

2. The prior art of record that matters most

Note on date status. R1–R14 all published more than one year before May 19, 2017, so they are prior art under §102(a)(1) with no grace-period exception available. R11 published Feb 4, 2016 — also more than one year before the priority date — so it too is §102(a)(1) art (the §102(b)(1) exception reaches only disclosures made ≤1 year before filing). R15 is the edge case addressed in §6.

3. Claim 1 (and its twins, claims 15 and 16) — element mapping

Claim 1 recites four operative limitations. Claims 15 and 16 use materially identical language (the storage-device and method forms), so the same mapping disposes of all three independent claims.

Every element of claim 1 is disclosed; the only question is whether the combination is non-obvious.

4. The obviousness combinations

Combination A (strongest): R2 + R4/R5 + R10/R11 + R6/R7

The combination. Bonnardot (R2), Zhao (R4) and the tacholess-envelope-order reference (R5) — optionally formalized by Fyfe & Munck (R1) — supply the order-tracking framework: derive a phase–time map from a signal, resample the (envelope of the) vibration signal at constant angular increments by interpolation, and then look for the bearing fault frequency in the resulting spectrum. Gong & Qiao (R10) and US 2016/0033580 (R11) supply the current signal as the source of the speed reference in a wind-turbine generator. Randall & Antoni (R6) and Feldman (R7) supply the envelope analysis and the bearing characteristic frequencies that define the "characteristic signature."

Motivation to combine (articulated):

1. The problem is common and the solution was known. Variable-speed operation causes "frequency modulation and spectral smearing" and "the frequency band of those harmonics will overlap when the speed variation is large" (R4) — exactly the wind-turbine problem the '214 Background concedes. Order tracking "is an effective technique to solve the spectrum smearing problem caused by speed variation so that the conventional spectrum analysis methods can be employed afterwards" (R4) — a POSITA would not need the patent to reach this.

2. Order tracking needs a speed reference, and tacho-less extraction from vibration is acknowledged to be difficult. R4/R2 themselves note the traditional tachometer's cost and installation problems; R2's method "necessitate[s] a low speed fluctuation"; R4 notes prior tacho-less methods are limited. The '214 specification says the same about vibration: "it is difficult to extract a reference signal from the bearing vibration signal." A POSITA therefore had a recognized need for a better reference-signal source.

3. The generator current was the obvious candidate, and the art said so. Gong & Qiao (R10) and Qiao's US 2016/0033580 (R11) teach that the turbine generator current is already available and carries the shaft-speed information; the current's fundamental is "a fixed multiplier of the varying shaft speed" and "generator current signals are already measured and used by wind turbine control systems; no additional sensor … is required." R12 (Leeb) confirms that electrical current is a recognized speed-information source. Substituting current for a tachometer/gear-mesh reference in the order-tracking scheme is a substitution of a known equivalent element to obtain a predictable result (KSR Int'l v. Teleflex).

4. Envelope resampling specifically — and why it is not a non-obvious refinement. R5 already performs envelope order analysis for bearings at varying speed, and R2/R9/Borghesani teach envelope analysis as the standard bearing technique under non-stationary conditions. The '214's stated reason for resampling the envelope "rather than the original signal" (to avoid re-introducing smearing around the structural resonance frequency) is the ordinary consequence, well known from R6/R9, of resampling a resonance-carried fault signal. A POSITA applying order tracking to a bearing signal would naturally take the envelope first.

Reasonable expectation of success. Each sub-step was separately validated in the art (R1, R2, R4, R5, R6, R10, R11), and the combination is a straightforward serial pipeline. Nothing here requires unpredictable results.

Combination B: R1 (Fyfe & Munck) + R11 (US 2016/0033580) + R6 (Randall & Antoni)

This combination is arguably the cleanest because it uses the applicant's own prior art.

• R1 provides every order-tracking mechanics limitation: phase–time map construction, constant-angular-increment resampling, cubic-spline interpolation (mapped to claim 1 steps (c2)–(c3) and claims 8/20).
• R11 provides the current-signal / turbine-generator / synchronous-resampling context — receiving a generator current, estimating shaft rotating frequency, computing a second set of sampling times "in which the phase intervals of adjacent samples are substantially constant," and re-sampling accordingly, to detect a fault at a characteristic frequency (R11 even lists bearing cage-fault frequencies and shows them in the current PSD). R11 thus discloses, in a turbine-generator setting, the same "derive speed from current → resample at constant phase → detect characteristic frequency" architecture the '214 claims — but applied to a demodulated current signal.
• R6 supplies the reason and the signal the '214 switches to: for bearing diagnosis, vibration envelope analysis is the recognized, more sensitive method ("vibration monitoring has been widely recognized as one of the most popular, effective, and reliable methods" — the '214 Background itself).

Motivation. Given R11's teaching that the current can supply a phase-locked resampling clock for a turbine generator, and R6's teaching that bearing faults are best seen in the vibration envelope, it would have been obvious to a POSITA to use the current-derived clock to order-track the vibration envelope instead of the current itself — i.e., to keep R11's speed-reference mechanism and swap in the recognized bearing signal. The '214's own results confirm the expectation: the patent reports that the current-based method failed for inner- and outer-race faults while the vibration-based method succeeded (Table III), i.e., the claimed approach is the predictable improvement one would expect from using the better signal with an already-known resampling clock.

Combination C: R2 (Bonnardot) + R7/R6 (envelope/Hilbert) + R10/R11/R12 (current-as-speed-source)

A three-reference combination sufficient to render claim 1 obvious:

• R2 supplies "resample the signal against the angle by using [a measured] signal … interpolation … to estimate the acceleration in angular domain" and "envelope analysis … the bearing fault frequency was then detected."
• R10/R11/R12 supply the substitution of the generator current for R2's gear-mesh/acceleration reference in the wind-turbine context (and R11 supplies the explicit "estimate shaft rotating frequency" step).
• R7 supplies the Hilbert-transform envelope of claim 5.

Motivation: R2's own limitation ("necessitate a low speed fluctuation") and its dependence on a gear-mesh harmonic (absent in a direct-drive turbine) create a known deficiency that the current signal — dominant, monocomponent, and proportional to shaft speed (the '214 Background; R10/R11) — remedies. "If a technique has been used to improve one device, and a person of ordinary skill … would recognize that it would improve similar devices in the same way, using the technique is obvious" (KSR).

Combination D (near-anticipatory): R15 alone or R15 + R6

The inventors' own IEEE TIE paper (R15) discloses the claimed method essentially verbatim: estimate the current fundamental frequency in the time-frequency domain to get shaft rotating frequency → establish the phase–time relationship → resample the envelope of the synchronously recorded vibration signal at equal-phase-increment points → detect bearing faults from peaks in the resampled envelope spectrum. If R15 were citable prior art, claim 1 would be at least obvious and arguably anticipated. But see §6 — R15 may be removed by the §102(b)(1)(A) grace-period exception. That is precisely why Combinations A–C (built on non-inventor art) carry the load of the §103 case.

5. The dependent claims

Note: claims 6 and 7 recite the same oversampling concept twice (claim 6 as an operation, claim 7 as a signal-property recitation). That is a clarity/duplication concern, not a §103 concern, but it also means the oversampling feature adds nothing beyond what claim 6 already contributes to the obviousness analysis.

6. The one real obstacle: the §102(b)(1)(A) grace-period exception for R15

R15 (Wang, Peng & Qiao, IEEE TIE, Oct. 2016; DOI 10.1109/TIE.2016.2571258) is published less than one year before the May 19, 2017 priority date, and its authors Jun Wang and Wei Qiao are two of the three named '214 inventors (Wang, Qiao, Qu). Under AIA §102(b)(1)(A), a disclosure made ≤1 year before the effective filing date is not prior art if "the disclosure was made by the inventor or joint inventor or by another who obtained the subject matter disclosed directly or indirectly from the inventor or a joint inventor." Because the disclosure was made by joint inventors (with a third author, Peng, who presumably obtained the subject matter from them), R15 likely falls within the grace-period exception and may be removable as prior art.

Implications for the §103 case:

• R15 should not be relied on as the sole or primary reference unless one is prepared to litigate the exception. Its most defensible uses are (i) as evidence of the state of the art / what a POSITA knew (its teachings may still inform the level of ordinary skill and the motivation to combine non-inventor art), and (ii) background.
• The §103 case should therefore rest principally on Combinations A and B, which are built on non-inventor art that predates the critical date by well over a year (R1 1997, R2 2005, R3 2007, R4/R5 2013, R6 2011, R7 2011, R8 2014, R9 2013, R10 2011–2015, R11 pub. Feb 2016, R12 1996, R13 1998/2000, R14 2011/2015). All of these are §102(a)(1) art with no exception available.
• Note also that R11 (US 2016/0033580) is a Qiao/Gong document published Feb 4, 2016 — more than one year before the priority date — so §102(b)(1)(A) does not reach it; it is solid prior art. (Its common ownership with the '214 via NuTech Ventures would only matter for the §102(a)(2) "patent-application-as-prior-art" branch; the printed-publication branch of §102(a)(1) is unaffected by common ownership, and the §102(b)(1) grace period does not apply because the publication is >1 year old.)

7. Secondary considerations (objective indicia)

Nothing in the record I can find supplies strong secondary evidence:

• No unexpected results. The patent's own comparative data (Table III) show the vibration-based method working and the current-based method failing — the expected outcome of using the better signal, not an unexpected one.
• No evidence of industry praise, licensing-for-novelty, copying, or long-felt unmet need specific to the claimed combination appears in the patent or the sources reviewed. The '214 reads as a normal incremental application of known order-tracking/envelope-analysis techniques to a known platform (direct-drive wind turbines), patented through a university technology-transfer office. (No litigation/PTAB record was located for the '214 — consistent with the earlier litigation section — so there is no adjudicated secondary-considerations record either.)
• A patentee might argue the selection of the generator current (over gear-mesh or vibration) as the reference source was non-obvious. That argument is weak given R10/R11/R12 and the express recognition in the art that the current fundamental is dominant and proportional to shaft speed.

8. Bottom line

1. Independent claims 1, 15, and 16 would have been obvious under §103 over R2 (Bonnardot) + R4 (Zhao) + R5 (Zhao Sensors) + R10 (Gong & Qiao) + R11 (US 2016/0033580) + R6 (Randall & Antoni), and alternatively over R1 (Fyfe & Munck) + R11 + R6, with R7 (Feldman) and R9 (Borghesani) as secondary references. The motivation is supplied by the admitted variable-speed spectral-smearing problem, the recognized difficulty/cost of tachometer and vibration-derived references, and the recognized availability of the generator current as a shaft-speed reference.

2. Every dependent claim adds only conventional, separately known limitations (Hilbert envelope; oversampling/anti-aliasing; cubic-spline/vector resampling; order-domain/FFT representation with a reference-shaft-speed rescaling; characteristic-frequency-based fault typing) drawn from the same reference set.

3. The single most likely validity vulnerability is also the most awkward to assert: the inventors' own R15 (IEEE TIE 2016) discloses the invention essentially verbatim but is likely removed by the §102(b)(1)(A) grace-period exception. A challenger should therefore lead with the non-inventor Combinations A/B, and use R15 only as state-of-the-art/level-of-skill evidence.

Confidence and limitations. I am confident in the identity, dates, and general teachings of R1–R14 because they come from the patent's own of-record reference list with abstract-level confirmation from the searches above. I have not verified each reference's precise page/paragraph-level teachings against full texts, and I have not seen an examiner's actual §103 rejection (none appears on the page). Claim-element mappings above are therefore analytical inferences, not of-record findings, and should be confirmed against the operative claim text (which I have, from uspto.report) and, for any high-stakes use, against the full prior-art documents and PatentCenter file history. No litigation or PTAB proceeding involving US 10,852,214 was located, consistent with the previously generated litigation section.