It is getting difficult to manage water resources in South Korea because more than half of annual precipitation is concentrated in the summer season and its intensity is getting severe due to global warming and climate change. Artificial recharge schemes can be a useful method to manage water resources in Korea adapting to climate change. Patent analysis enables us to prevent overlapping investment and to find out unoccupied technology. In this study, international patent trends and barriers of artificial recharge technology are analysed for patents of Korea, Japan, the United States and Europe. The four artificial recharge methods such as well recharge, surface infiltration, bank filtration and underground structures are classified as main class and the nine sub-technologies such as water intake, water treatment, injection wells, monitoring of groundwater flow, groundwater pumping, surface infiltration/soil aquifer treatment, radial collection well, iron/manganese treatment, and underground subsurface dam are classified as intermediate class. Water intake techniques are subdivided into five classifications. Total 1,281 of patents, searched by WIPS DB tool and selected after removing noisy patents, are analyzed quantitatively to evaluate application trends by year, applicant, country for each classified technologies and analyzed qualitatively to find out occupied and unoccupied technologies. It is expected that upcoming research and development project could be performed efficiently in that an avoidance plan for the similar patents and differentiation plan for the advancing patents are set up based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis results from this research.

Keywords: artificial recharge;patent analysis;unoccupied technology;WIPS DB;