Air Cooled Heat Exchangers Patents: Leaders & White Space 2026
Air Cooled Heat Exchangers and Dry Cooling Patents
Concentrated at the top. The top 5 assignees hold 65.9% of all 135 records in scope, and the top 10 hold 92.6% — a long tail of single-filing entrants fills what's left. Filing rose to a peak of 10 in 2018, then eased off. The 2026 figure of 0 is a partial year and should not be read as a drop-off — it reflects the data cut-off and publication lag, not an end to filing.
- 1PLASCOENERGY IP HLDG SL27
- 2ENERGY & ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH CENTER FOUNDATION24
- 3PLASCO CONVERSION TECH INC15
- 4APPLIED RESEARCH ASSOCIATES INC12
- 5HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE DEV LP11
See the full air cooled heat exchangers and dry cooling analysis in Eureka
- The complete ranking, not just the top five
- Every IPC branch with its share of the corpus
- The most-cited records, and where claim space is still thin
Common questions on this landscape
Who are the leading patent holders in air cooled heat exchangers and dry cooling?
Filing is concentrated: the top 5 assignees hold 65.9% of all 135 records in scope, and the top 10 hold 92.6%. The single leading assignee holds 27 records, well ahead of the fifth-ranked holder at 11 and the tenth-ranked holder at 4. Beyond the top 10, the remaining filers each hold only a handful of records, so due diligence on this field should focus first on the leading names rather than trying to track all 37 ranked companies equally.
Is the dry cooling patent field still growing?
The filing trend peaked in 2018 at 10 filings and has not returned to that level since. A growth rate cannot be reliably computed from the final years of this dataset because publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, which understates the most recent year or two. Treat the apparent recent decline as partly an artefact of that lag rather than firm evidence the field has stopped moving.
What technology areas dominate the IPC classification of this dataset?
Gasification of fuels (C10J) is the single most-touched class, appearing in 30.4% of the 135 records, ahead of steam condensers (F28B, 23.7%) and direct-contact heat exchange (F28C, 22.2%). Heat-exchanger hardware detail claims (F28F) and steam/thermal power plant claims (F01K) also carry meaningful weight. Because a single record can carry multiple IPC classes, these percentages overlap rather than sum to 100%, which signals that much of the corpus treats dry cooling as embedded within larger plant or process patents.
Disclaimer. This analysis is based on Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent records and is provided for general information and reference only. Patent data carries inherent limitations — recent filings are under-counted because of publication lag, counts may be on a record or family basis, classification and applicant-name data may contain errors or duplicates, and the underlying search query defines the scope shown — so the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing here is an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Verify independently and review with qualified patent and legal professionals before acting on it.
Method: Filing trend and technology composition. Derived from a Patsnap search on Air Cooled Heat Exchangers and Dry Cooling covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish. Every share divides by all records in scope. Data: Patsnap Eureka. See the full landscape report.