Disc-Stack Centrifugation Shear Control Patents: Leaders & White Space 2026
- Concentrated at the top. The five most active filers together hold 96 records — 32.9% of the 292 in scope — while the ranked leaders' list runs 100 deep with a long single-filing tail.
- Filing is still climbing, not plateauing. From 2021 to 2024, the last year that can be read as complete, filings rose from 2 to 3 records, a 50% increase; 2025 onward is understated because publication lags filing by about 18 months.
- Centrifuge claims dominate, but engine lubrication and bioreactor uses are real overlaps. B04B covers 91.1% of the 292 records, while F01M (engine lubrication) reaches 18.5% and C12M (bioreactors) 7.5% — signalling where shear-control claims cross into adjacent equipment classes.
Filing growth compares 2021 (2 records) with 2024 (3) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 292 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this landscape covers
Disc-stack centrifugation shear control sits at the intersection of mechanical separation equipment and the process conditions — feed acceleration, bowl speed, pressure drop — that determine whether a separated product survives the process intact. The scope here spans 292 published records filed against IPC classes covering centrifuges (B04B), separation apparatus (B05B) and microorganism or cell-culture apparatus (C12N), captured through a search string built around cell damage, shear rate and product-quality language rather than the equipment term alone.
That framing matters because the same rotor geometry that separates oil from water in an engine sump can be the difference between a viable and a lysed cell culture in a bioreactor feed. The classes below show how far the claim language actually travels beyond the core centrifuge subclass.
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Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 292 records: how filing activity has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses the claims actually sit in.
Filing activity, 2017–2026
Filings ran near zero through the late 2010s, rose to a peak of 10 records in 2022, and the 2021-to-2024 span shows a 50% increase (2 to 3 records) on the complete-year figures. The 2025 and 2026 counts will continue to rise as later publications catch up with filing dates.
Where the claims sit
B04B (centrifuges) anchors 91.1% of the 292 records, confirming this is fundamentally centrifuge-equipment art. The meaningful overlaps are F01M engine lubrication at 18.5% and B01D separation processes at 11.0%, with C12M bioreactor apparatus and C12N microorganism classes each in the 7% range — the biological-processing crossover that shear-control claims increasingly touch.
Shares are the percentage of the 292 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Disc-Stack Centrifugation Shear Control with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about disc-stack centrifugation shear control and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaRepresentative filing and most-cited prior art
US9512755B2 — Centrifugal separator
A device for cleaning of polluted gas from a combustion engine, includes a centrifugal separator with a centrifuge rotor arranged to cause the polluted gas to rotate. The centrifuge rotor comprises a stack of truncated conical separating discs disposed at mutual spacing so they delimit intermediate spaces between them for the gas to flow through. An outlet chamber is disposed centrally within the stack of separating discs, whereby the centrifuge rotor is configured for counterflow separation.Filed by Alfa Laval Corporate AB, published 2016-12-06 — illustrative of disc-stack geometry claims extended into engine gas-cleaning applications.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US4978616A | Fluidized cell cultivation process | 166 |
| 2 | US4846780A | Centrifuge processor and liquid level control system | 141 |
| 3 | US5053127A | Continuous centrifugation system and method for directly deriving intermediate density material from a suspen… | 139 |
| 4 | US5857955A | Centrifuge control system | 126 |
| 5 | US4944883A | Continuous centrifugation system and method for directly deriving intermediate density material from a suspen… | 118 |
| 6 | US6019717A | Nozzle inlet enhancement for a high speed turbine-driven centrifuge | 109 |
| 7 | US20020164795A1 | Storage agent for preservation of an animal cell, tissue or organ, and preserved process of the same | 74 |
| 8 | US4492631A | Centrifugal separator | 68 |
| 9 | US6713028B1 | Rotating process chamber with integral pump and energy recovery turbine | 64 |
| 10 | US6368264B1 | Centrifuge control system and method with operation monitoring and pump control | 61 |
Citation counts reward older filings that have had longer to accumulate citations inside this corpus — read them as a signal of influence on later filers, not as a ranking of current commercial importance.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Browse MCP servers →What the numbers mean for a filing decision
Three read-outs from the concentration, trend and classification data above, aimed at where to file and where not to.
The top of the field is dense, not crowded end to end
With 96 of 292 records held by the five most active assignees and the leader alone holding 48, core disc-stack rotor and feed-control claims are occupied ground. The ranked list runs 100 companies deep, so beyond the leading names it thins quickly into single- and double-filing entrants.
Activity is still building, not cooling
The complete-year data shows filings rising from 2 in 2021 to 3 in 2024, a 50% increase. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the apparent drop-off in 2025 and 2026 reflects reporting lag, not declining interest.
Engine lubrication is the largest adjacent claim territory
Nearly a fifth of the 292 records also carry an F01M engine-lubrication classification, alongside smaller but consistent overlaps into B01D separation apparatus and C12M bioreactor equipment. Shear-control claims are being written for more than one industry at once.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to disc-stack centrifugation shear control, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who is active and where the gate sits
The leader holds 48 records against a fifth-place figure of 8 and a tenth-place figure of 7 — a steep drop-off that defines who sets the terms in core rotor and bowl-speed claims versus who is filing around the edges.
One filer sets the pace
The leading assignee's 48 records dwarf the fifth-place figure of 8, meaning the earliest and broadest disc-stack shear-control claims are concentrated with a single filer rather than split among several comparable-sized portfolios.
A tight mid-tier before the tail begins
Positions five through ten sit close together, from 8 down to 7 records, before the ranking opens into a long tail of single- and low-filing entrants across the remaining 100 ranked companies.
Ten filers hold under half the field
133 of the 292 records, or 45.5%, sit with the ten most active assignees — leaving more than half the corpus distributed across the remaining ranked entrants, a sign that late entrants still have room to build a position outside the core claims.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| GLACIER METAL | 0 | — |
| Mann+Hummel GmbH | 0 | — |
| Alfa Laval Corporate AB | 0 | — |
| Federal Mogul Engineering Ltd. | 0 | — |
| AEPLC (Advanced Energy plc) | 0 | — |
| Sun Foods Ltd. | 0 | — |
| F.L. Smidth & Co. A/S | 0 | -100% |
| BIRD MACHINE COMPANY INC | 0 | — |
Where to take this
The dataset points to a field with an occupied core and open edges. The next step is usually narrower than another landscape scan.
Map the leader's claim boundaries
With 48 of 292 records, the top filer's granted claims define where a freedom-to-operate review needs to start. Pull their independent claims before drafting around bowl-speed or feed-acceleration language.
Explore claims in EurekaTrack the under-claimed branches
Wastewater and body-fluid overlaps sit under 5% of records each — thin enough that a well-drafted first claim could hold real breadth. Confirm that thinness holds once new publications catch up on the 2025–2026 filing lag.
Run a white-space search in EurekaCommon questions on this landscape
One assignee leads with 48 of the 292 records in scope, well ahead of the fifth-place holder at 8 and the tenth-place holder at 7. The top five filers combined hold 96 records, or 32.9% of the field, so the earliest and broadest claims sit with a small group rather than being evenly spread. Beyond the top ten, the ranking runs to 100 companies with a long tail of single- or low-filing entrants.
On the complete-year data, filings rose from 2 in 2021 to 3 in 2024, a 50% increase, with a peak of 10 records in 2022. The apparent decline in 2025 and 2026 is not a real slowdown — publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, so the most recent one to two years of any patent trend always look artificially low. Treat 2024 as the most recent reliable data point.
Centrifuge apparatus claims (B04B) cover 91.1% of the 292 records, but a meaningful share also touches engine lubrication (F01M, 18.5%), general separation processes (B01D, 11.0%), and bioreactor or cell-culture apparatus (C12M and C12N, each around 7%). This means shear-control innovations developed for one industry, such as automotive filtration, are being claimed in ways that also cover biological processing equipment, and vice versa.
US9512755B2, assigned to Alfa Laval Corporate AB, claims a centrifugal separator built around a stack of truncated conical separating discs arranged for counterflow gas separation, specifically for cleaning polluted gas from a combustion engine. Its claims are tied to a centrifuge rotor housed within the engine and configured with a central outlet chamber. Anyone designing a disc-stack rotor for engine gas cleaning with a similar counterflow outlet arrangement should review this filing's exact claim language before finalising geometry.
The lowest subclass shares in this dataset point to the open branches: wastewater-specific shear thresholds (C02F, 3.8% of records) and body-fluid processing geometries (A61M, 4.1%) are both thinly claimed relative to the core centrifuge art. Real-time bowl-speed feedback and feed-acceleration ramp profiling for shear-sensitive cells also show no dense clustering in the current 292-record set. These are not guarantees of novelty, but they are areas where the claim density is low enough to be worth a dedicated prior-art check before drafting.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.