ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 3 -- United States Patent no. 12,343,715, issued on July 1, was assigned to NGK INSULATORS Ltd. (Nagoya, Japan).

"Pillar-shaped honeycomb structure" was invented by Shuji Muramatsu (Nagoya, Japan) and Yasuhiro Shiga (Nagoya, Japan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A pillar-shaped honeycomb structure includes an outer peripheral side wall, and a plurality of partition walls partitioning a plurality of cells, wherein an average pore diameter of the partition walls measured by a mercury intrusion method specified in JIS R1655: 2003 is 3 to 10 micro metre, and when a cross-section of the plurality of partition walls is observed with an X-ray microscope and a porosity (%) is mea...