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You may search the nearly 100 important patents currently included in the RP Patent Museum from this page using single or multiple keywords, boolean expressions and other ways. See the HELP page linked above, or the suggestions below for search strategies.

To do a complete and thorough IP search, however, you should purchase the complete RP US Patent Database. It includes approximately 6,000 patents and published patent applications covering the period 1892 to the present. All aspects of RP are covered: systems, materials, software, rapid tooling, rapid manufacturing, medicine, dentistry, art and other applications. Best yet, once you purchase the database, you'll also have permanent access to major updates for a small additional charge.

You can also keep up to the minute by having the Additive Fabrication Spy^TM sent to you quarterly. It's the easy way to see what the competition is up to, find out where the industry is going, and improve your chances for a successful R & D effort. Would you like to receive a large, thoroughly indexed book about the latest developments in RP every three months? That's what the Additive Fabrication Spy^TM is.

Searching Suggestions

Search for strings of characters or expressions by enclosing the term in quotes, e.g., "rapid prototyping." Keywords may include technologies, inventor or assignee names, etc. Corporation, university and country names may be abbreviated in unexpected ways. Try adding hyphens and spaces to find suspected variations and try enclosing search terms in quotation marks. Annual Title pages containing keywords will also appear in the search results.

Searches may be case sensitive. It's also possible to obtain different results when performing a string search with or without quotation marks surrounding a keyword, for example, "stereolithography" versus stereolithography.

Searching for patent numbers. To search for a particular patent number, use the form: 5123456 - without commas.

Searching for inventor names. Inventor names are generally in the form: "lastname; firstname mi." Use a string search with a semicolon as shown, and place a wild card character (*) at the end of the first name if the middle initial is not known. Example: "hull; charles*"

Obtaining complete text and drawings.

You can obtain the full text and drawings from either the US Patent and Trademark Office web site.

The US PTO site provides full electronic text, but requires a browser plug-in for you to view or download drawings.

Note that you can cut and paste the patent numbers from your search results directly into the search windows on those sites to save time. It's often helpful to open an additional browser window and cut and paste between them.