Spar-Buoy Wind Mooring Patents: Who Leads, Where the Gaps Are 2026
Filing growth compares 2021 (6 records) with 2024 (2) — 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 16 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this landscape covers
This landscape tracks patent filings for spar-buoy mooring systems on floating offshore wind turbines — the ballasted, deep-draft spar hull and its mooring lines, as distinct from semi-submersible or tension-leg floater designs. The search spans spar buoy mooring, floating wind mooring, spar platform mooring and wind turbine spar terms cross-referenced against floating and offshore wind turbine context, covering publications from 2015 through the July 2026 data cut-off.
The scope is deliberately narrow: 16 published records in total, which makes this a concentrated niche within the broader floating wind patent space rather than a sprawling field. That narrowness is itself informative — it means individual filings carry more relative weight, and a single well-drafted claim can dominate a meaningful share of the documented art.
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Filing trend and technology mix
Two views of the same 16-record dataset: how filing activity has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses the claims actually sit in.
Filing activity, 2017-2026
Filings rose to a peak of six records in 2021, then declined to two by 2024 — a 67% fall over that three-year window. Because publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, the 2025 and 2026 figures are still filling in and should not be read as a continued decline.
IPC subclass composition
B63B (ships and marine vessels) appears on 68.8% of the 16 records, reflecting that spar hulls are classified as marine structures as often as they are as wind equipment. B66C (cranes and hoists) covers 31.3% and F03D (wind motors) only 25.0%, meaning installation and marine-engineering claims outweigh turbine-specific claims in this dataset. Because records can carry multiple classes, these shares add up to more than 100% and should not be summed.
Shares are the percentage of the 16 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
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WO2013137744A1 — Floating wind turbine with wave energy converter
The invention is a floating wind turbine comprising a wind turbine rotor mounted on a tower of a spar and tower structure, with a generally vertical buoyant and deep, ballasted spar moored in a mooring, the turbine rotor connected to a first electrical power generator. The spar and tower structure is provided with a buoyant torus arranged at mean water level, which oscillates with sea waves in an axial direction relative to the spar and tower structure and is provided with a power take-off.Filed by NTNU Technology Transfer AS; the most-cited record in this dataset at 23 citations.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | WO2013137744A1 | Floating wind turbine with wave energy converter | 23 |
| 2 | US20110214596A1 | Vertically installed SPAR and construction methods | 21 |
| 3 | CN106567591A | 一种多层调频液体阻尼器 | 8 |
| 4 | WO2022098246A1 | Installing offshore floating wind turbines | 4 |
| 5 | GB2600927A | Installing offshore floating wind turbines | 3 |
Citation counts reward older filings that have had more time to accumulate references — read them as a measure of influence within this corpus, not as a ranking of current technical importance.
Patent titles are shown in the language they were filed in, not translated, so that each record stays verifiable against the original filing — a translated title will not match in Eureka or in any national register. Publication numbers are shown where the record carries one (5 of 5 rows); clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Reading the concentration, the trend and the classification mix together gives a picture of a small, top-heavy field with a narrow technical core.
A small field, tightly held
Fourteen of the sixteen records in scope sit with just five assignees, and all sixteen are accounted for once the ranked leaders' full list of seven is included. That leaves essentially no unclaimed territory among filed assignees — new entrants are working around existing claims rather than filing into open space.
Activity has cooled from its 2021 peak
Filing peaked at six records in 2021 and dropped to two by 2024, a 67% decline over three years. That drop predates the publication lag window, so it reflects real filing behaviour rather than an artefact of recent data being incomplete.
Marine engineering framing outweighs turbine framing
Claims in this space are drafted and classified more often as ship and marine-vessel structures than as wind turbine equipment — F03D covers only a quarter of records. Anyone drafting new claims should expect examiners to search marine hull and mooring art as heavily as wind-turbine prior art.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to floating offshore wind — spar-buoy wind-turbine mooring patent landscape, with the prior art for and against each one.
Where to take this analysis
The dataset points to a concentrated, marine-engineering-framed field with a cooling filing rate — the open questions now are about claim scope, not volume.
Map claim scope against the leading five
With 87.5% of records held by five assignees, freedom-to-operate work should start with those claim sets before looking at the long tail.
Explore assignee claims in EurekaWatch the installation and marine-hull classes
B63B and B66C coverage outweighs F03D, so installation-method and hull-structure claims deserve as much scrutiny as turbine-specific ones.
Run an IPC-level search in EurekaTrack whether 2025-2026 filings revive the trend
The 2021-2024 decline is real, but publication lag means the most recent two years are not yet a reliable signal either way.
Set up a filing alert in EurekaCommon questions on spar-buoy mooring patents
The ranking covers seven assignees across all 16 records in this dataset, and the leading assignee holds five of them — the largest single share. The next four assignees combined bring the top five to 14 of the 16 records, or 87.5% of the field. Beyond that, filing drops to single records held by individual inventors and one university, so the field is best described as concentrated at the top with a short tail rather than fragmented across many players.
Filing peaked at six records in 2021 and had fallen to two by 2024, a 67% decline over that three-year span. That is a genuine slowdown rather than a data gap, since 2024 is recent enough to be considered complete. Figures for 2025 and 2026 are still filling in because publication typically lags actual filing by about 18 months, so it is too early to say whether the decline continues, flattens, or reverses.
68.8% of the 16 records in this landscape carry the B63B classification for ships and marine vessels, well ahead of the 25.0% tagged under F03D for wind motors specifically. This happens because a spar hull, its ballast and its mooring lines are structurally closer to marine vessel and offshore structure engineering than to turbine rotor or drivetrain technology. Anyone drafting or searching claims in this space should expect examiners to pull marine hull and mooring prior art as readily as wind-turbine art.
WO2013137744A1, filed by NTNU Technology Transfer AS, claims a floating wind turbine with a ballasted spar-and-tower structure moored to the seabed, combined with a buoyant torus at mean water level that oscillates with wave motion and drives a power take-off. It is the most-cited record in this dataset at 23 citations, which signals strong influence on later filings in this niche. It does not block spar-mooring designs generally, but any design that adds a wave-oscillating torus power take-off to a moored spar-and-tower turbine sits close to its claimed combination and warrants a design-around review.
The technology composition shows heavy coverage of marine vessel structure (B63B, 68.8%) and installation cranes and hoists (B66C, 31.3%), but comparatively thin coverage of wind-turbine-specific integration (F03D, 25.0%) and virtually no claims touching bridge-adjacent structural analogues or hydraulic machinery beyond a single record each. That imbalance suggests under-claimed room in areas like mooring-line condition sensing, single-lift crane installation methods tailored to spar geometry, and hybrid ballast-tuning mechanisms — branches adjacent to the core spar-and-mooring claims but not yet densely occupied.
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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.