Heat Exchanger Patents: Top Companies & Filing Trends 2026
- 9.0% of the field. The five most active filers together account for 27,751 of 308,784 records in scope — a real lead, but not a lockout.
- Filings have cooled slightly, not collapsed. Filings ran 1,037 in 2021 to 882 in 2024, a 15% pullback over a complete three-year window — 2025 and 2026 figures are still filling in as publication catches up.
- Heat-exchanger detail and refrigeration claims dominate. F25B and F28D together anchor the IPC mix, while domestic heating (F24D) and external-combustion (F02G) subclasses sit well below 1% of records.
Filing growth compares 2021 (1,037 records) with 2024 (882) — 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 308,784 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What the heat exchanger patent record actually shows
Heat exchangers sit at the intersection of refrigeration, HVAC, power generation and industrial process equipment, which is why a search built around heat exchanger, thermal exchanger and adjacent terms like working fluid or thermal storage returns a corpus spanning eight distinct IPC subclasses. The dataset in scope covers 308,784 published records filed or published between 2015 and the August 2026 cut-off, ranked across 100 assignees that the underlying search returns as its full assignee list — not a curated top tier.
The filing curve peaked in 2022 at 1,045 records and has eased since, though the most recent years always understate true filing activity because publication typically lags filing by around 18 months. Reading the trend through 2024, the last year that can be treated as complete, gives a fairer picture than reading it through the partial 2025-2026 tail.
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Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 308,784-record corpus: activity over time, and where claims cluster across the IPC subclasses that make up the heat exchanger field.
A cooling but not collapsing filing curve
Annual filings climbed to a peak of 1,045 in 2022, then eased to 882 by 2024 — a 15% pullback from the 2021 figure of 1,037 over that three-year span. Figures for 2025 and 2026 are still incomplete because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months; they should not be read as a further decline yet.
Refrigeration and heat-exchange detail lead the IPC mix
F25B (refrigeration and heat pumps) and F28D (heat-exchange apparatus) are the two largest subclasses by record share, followed by F01K (steam and thermal power plants) and F28F (heat-exchanger details). Because a single record can carry several IPC codes, these shares — each measured against the same 308,784-record total — add up to more than 100%; smaller subclasses such as F24D and F02G sit at 0.3% each, marking the field's narrower branches.
Shares are the percentage of the 308,784 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Heat Exchangers Patent Landscape with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about heat exchangers patent landscape and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaThe prior art shaping freedom to operate
US10775111B2 — Pumped heat energy storage system with conveyable solid thermal storage media directly thermally coupled to working fluid
A pumped heat energy storage system uses a thermodynamic charging assembly to compress a working fluid and generate thermal energy, which a thermal storage assembly stores at atmospheric pressure using a conveyable bulk solid thermal storage media. A discharging assembly then extracts that stored thermal energy and converts it to electrical energy, with a heat exchanger assembly coupling the storage assembly to the working-fluid circuits on both the charging and discharging sides.Filed by Siemens Energy, published 2020-09-15 — a grid-scale thermal storage architecture rather than a component-level heat exchanger claim.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US5560362A | Active thermal control of ultrasound transducers | 750 |
| 2 | US5720923A | Nucleic acid amplification reaction apparatus | 641 |
| 3 | US4498289A | Carbon dioxide power cycle | 537 |
| 4 | US5802856A | Multizone bake/chill thermal cycling module | 528 |
| 5 | US6200536B1 | Active microchannel heat exchanger | 432 |
| 6 | US4516632A | Microchannel crossflow fluid heat exchanger and method for its fabrication | 382 |
| 7 | US20160248631A1 | Computing infrastructure | 361 |
| 8 | US20030062149A1 | Electroosmotic microchannel cooling system | 352 |
| 9 | US6119463A | Thermoelectric heat exchanger | 336 |
| 10 | US6095505A | Patient-end humidifier | 327 |
Citation counts inside a searched corpus favour older filings that have had more years to accumulate references — treat them as a signal of influence on later work, not as a measure of current commercial relevance.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Three figures worth acting on before drafting claims or scoping freedom-to-operate work in this space.
Leadership is real but not a lockout
The five most active filers hold 27,751 records between them, and the ten most active hold 41,059 — 13.3% of all records in scope. That leaves the large majority of the corpus spread across a long tail of single- and few-filing entrants, which is where most freedom-to-operate risk and most white space actually sits.
A pullback from a 2022 peak, not a retreat from the field
Annual filings ran 1,037 in 2021, peaked at 1,045 in 2022, and settled at 882 by 2024. That is a real three-year pullback, but the 2025-2026 figures in the raw trend are still incomplete given the typical 18-month gap between filing and publication, so this should be read as cooling rather than as an exit.
Refrigeration and heat-pump claims carry the most weight
F25B (refrigeration and heat pumps) and F28D (heat-exchange apparatus) are the two most heavily claimed subclasses in this corpus. Narrower branches — domestic heating systems and external-combustion engines — sit at a fraction of that density, which is a useful signal for where claim space is still comparatively open.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to heat exchangers patent landscape, with the prior art for and against each one.
The assignee landscape
Filing activity spans consumer HVAC, automotive climate control, industrial refrigeration and power-generation equipment makers, with recent-year momentum concentrated in only a few names.
A single filer well ahead of the field
The top-ranked assignee holds 8,286 records, roughly two and a half times the fifth-place total of 3,248 and nearly four times the tenth-place total of 2,168 — a steep drop-off that marks a genuine leader rather than a tightly bunched top tier.
Several established filers pulled back sharply in the latest year
Multiple large assignees show 0 filings in the latest tracked year with -100% year-on-year moves, and one shows a -86% drop to a single filing. This pattern is consistent with publication lag rather than withdrawal from the field, but it means recent-year rankings should be read cautiously.
Collaboration is limited and mostly intra-group
Only 10 co-assignee pairs appear in the data, and the strongest pairings — such as a filer and its regional subsidiary, or a national oil company and its services arm — read more as corporate structure than as cross-company R&D partnership.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| LG Electronics Inc. | 1 | 0% |
| Trane International Inc. | 1 | -86% |
| Mitsubishi Electric Corporation | 0 | — |
| Daikin Industries, Ltd. | 0 | -100% |
| General Electric Company | 0 | -100% |
| Hamilton Sundstrand Corporation | 0 | -100% |
| Malta Inc. | 0 | -100% |
| Carrier Corporation (USA) | 0 | -100% |
Where to take this analysis
The dataset points to specific next steps depending on whether the goal is drafting, licensing or monitoring.
Scope a freedom-to-operate check
With the top 10 assignees holding only 13.3% of records, most claim risk in this field sits in the long tail rather than with a handful of dominant portfolios — worth confirming before committing to a design direction.
Run a freedom-to-operate search in EurekaTrack the pullback among leading filers
Several top assignees show sharp year-on-year drops in the latest tracked year; distinguishing genuine strategic pullback from publication lag needs a filing-date, not publication-date, view.
Build a monitoring alert in EurekaDraft into the under-claimed branches
Domestic heating integration and external-combustion cycles sit well below 1% of records each, suggesting room for narrowly drafted first claims rather than crowded continuation battles.
Explore white space with EurekaCommon questions about the heat exchanger patent landscape
The assignee ranking in this dataset covers 100 companies drawn from consumer HVAC, automotive, industrial refrigeration and power-generation sectors. The leading assignee holds 8,286 records, well ahead of the fifth-place holder at 3,248 and the tenth-place holder at 2,168, indicating a clear leader rather than a tightly bunched group at the top. Even so, the top 10 combined account for only 13.3% of all 308,784 records in scope, so the majority of filing activity sits outside the leadership tier.
Filings peaked at 1,045 in 2022 and eased to 882 by 2024, a 15% decline from the 2021 figure of 1,037 over that three-year span. That is a genuine cooling trend measured on complete years. Figures for 2025 and 2026 are still incomplete because publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, so the field should not yet be described as declining based on the most recent partial years.
F25B, covering refrigeration and heat pumps, and F28D, covering heat-exchange apparatus, are the two most heavily claimed IPC subclasses in this corpus, each above 1% of the 308,784 records in scope. Steam and thermal power plant claims (F01K) and heat-exchanger detail claims (F28F) follow closely behind. Because a single filing can carry multiple IPC codes, these subclass shares overlap rather than summing to a whole.
Domestic heating system integration (F24D) and external-combustion hot-gas cycles (F02G) each account for only about 0.3% of the 308,784 records in scope, far below the density seen in refrigeration and heat-exchange detail claims. That gap suggests narrower, more specific claim opportunities in those branches rather than crowded prior art. Any white-space assessment should still be paired with a targeted freedom-to-operate search before drafting.
US10775111B2, assigned to Siemens Energy and published in September 2020, claims a pumped heat energy storage system that compresses a working fluid to generate thermal energy, stores that energy in a conveyable solid thermal storage media at atmospheric pressure, and later discharges it through a heat exchanger assembly to generate electricity. It matters as a system-level architecture for grid-scale thermal storage rather than a narrow component claim, meaning it is more relevant to large-scale energy storage projects than to component-level heat exchanger design work.
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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.