High-Temperature Gas Reactor Core Design Patent Landscape 2026
- Thin filing record. only five published families sit inside the prismatic core, pebble bed core and fuel assembly claim space defined by this search, so no single filer controls the field yet.
- No sustained growth curve. filings were flat through the 2022 midpoint and peaked at just one family in 2024 — this is a pre-consolidation field, not a maturing one.
- Citation weight sits on one older record. a pebble bed side-reflector design carries 14 citations, far ahead of anything filed since, which tells you where examiners keep looking back to.
A narrow, still-open claim space
Reactor core design for high-temperature gas reactors — prismatic block cores, pebble bed cores, and the fuel assembly and core neutronics work that sits under IPC classes G21C1/07, G21C5 and G21C3 — has drawn only five published patent families in this coverage window. That is a small enough set that individual filings, rather than statistical trends, define the landscape. Publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025–2026 activity is understated here by construction, but even allowing for that lag the filing curve shows no acceleration through the visible years.
The record set spans classic HTGR assignees — general reactor manufacturers, a national lab-adjacent university foundation, and one heavy-industry conglomerate — alongside a tritium-production filing that sits at the edge of the search scope. Receiving offices split across Germany, Canada, Japan and the United States, which suggests parallel national filing rather than a single dominant jurisdiction of first filing.
Filing trend and technology composition
With only five published families, the trend line is a record of individual filing decisions rather than a market signal — read it as a list of events, not a curve.
Flat filing activity, single-family peak
The trend runs from zero families in 2017 to zero in the partial 2026 year, with a midpoint of zero in 2022 and a peak of just one family in 2024. There is no growth phase visible in this data — filing has been sporadic rather than building toward a wave.
Concentrated in core reactor classes
Five of five records classify under G21C (nuclear reactors), confirming the search is on-target for reactor core subject matter; one record also carries a G21G (conversion of nuclei) tag, marking the tritium-production filing as adjacent rather than core to the reactor-design question.
Shares are the percentage of the 5 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on High-Temperature Gas Reactor Reactor Core Design with Eureka
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Try EurekaWhat the most-cited and most-recent filings tell you
US20240420856A1 — Reactor core system (Purdue Research Foundation, filed 2024-12-19)
A high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) core is disclosed which includes a plurality of nuclear fuel kernels encapsulated by i) solid structures; and ii) porous structures, wherein the solid structures and the porous structures form a heterogeneous tileable repeating assembly including a channel for moving heat out of the HTGR core, wherein a ratio of in-channel porosity to in-channel tortuosity of the assembly is between about 0.2 to about 0.5, wherein the in-channel tortuosity is between about 1.0 and 1.6, and wherein total solid fraction of the assembly is between about 0.6 to about 0.85.The claim locks in specific numeric ranges for porosity-to-tortuosity ratio, tortuosity and solid fraction — a design-around has to sit clearly outside those bands to avoid the granted scope.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | DE3042552A1 | Pebble bed reactor side reflector – has block arranged to give uneven inner face thus reducing retarding effe… | 14 |
| 2 | CA1155565A | Production of tritium | 2 |
| 3 | US20240420856A1 | Reactor core system | 1 |
Citation counts inside a five-family corpus should be read as a marker of which design ideas got noticed early, not as a ranking of current commercial importance.
Publication numbers are shown where the record carries one (3 of 3 rows); clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Browse MCP servers →What five families actually tell you
A small corpus rewards caution: each of the following reads as an observation about this specific record set, not a market-wide law.
No filing wave has formed
The trend runs flat from 2017 through the 2022 midpoint and never exceeds one family in any single year, including the 2024 peak. Whatever is driving HTGR core design work today, it is not showing up yet as a filing surge in this dataset.
One reflector design still anchors the field
The pebble bed side-reflector filing carries far more citations than any other record in the set, making it the reference point examiners and drafters keep returning to for reflector geometry questions.
Filing is jurisdictionally scattered
Receiving offices split across Germany (2), Canada (1), Japan (1) and the United States (1) with no single office dominant. That spread is consistent with a handful of independent filers protecting home markets rather than a coordinated multi-jurisdiction strategy from one player.
Collaboration is rare, not absent
Only one co-assignee pairing shows up in the set, linking a university research foundation with a private co-filer. That is a single data point, but it is the only evidence of cross-entity collaboration in the entire corpus.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to high-temperature gas reactor reactor core design, with the prior art for and against each one.
| Assignee | Co-assignee | Shared families |
|---|---|---|
| Purdue Research Foundation | Ultra Bett GmbH | 1 |
The sole co-assignee pair links a university research foundation to a private-sector co-filer, the only cross-entity link visible in a five-family corpus.
Who is filing, and how much
Five assignees appear across five families — this is a field of singleton filers, not a hierarchy of leaders and followers. None of the tracked assignees show any filings in the latest year, consistent with the overall flat trend.
High Temperature Reactor Manufacturing Corp. (reactor manufacturer)
One of the named reactor-manufacturing assignees in the set, with no filings recorded in the most recent tracked year — momentum here has stalled rather than accelerated.
General Atomics
A long-established HTGR technology name in the set, currently showing no recent-year filings in this specific core-design search scope.
Purdue Research Foundation
Holder of the representative 2024 filing on fuel-kernel encapsulation and channel geometry, and party to the corpus's only co-assignee pairing, though with no further filings logged in the latest year.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (Mitsubishi Heavy Industries)
A heavy-industry conglomerate presence in the set, reflecting continued institutional interest in HTGR core hardware without recent-year filing activity in this scope.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| High Temperature Reactor Manufacturing Corp. | 0 | — |
| General Atomics | 0 | — |
| Purdue Research Foundation | 0 | — |
| Ultra Bett GmbH | 0 | — |
| Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. | 0 | — |
Where to take this next
A five-family corpus is a starting map, not a full clearance search. Use it to decide where to look closer, then verify against the full family and citation record before committing a filing strategy.
Run a full freedom-to-operate check on porosity and tortuosity ranges
The 2024 Purdue filing's numeric claim bands are narrow but specific; any fuel-channel design work should check its parameters against those ranges before finalizing geometry.
Explore claim scope in Eureka →Track the reflector-design citation cluster
The 14-citation side-reflector record is the single strongest influence signal in this set; new reflector geometry work should map against it explicitly.
Trace citation lineage in Eureka →Watch for filing pickup as the 18-month lag clears
Because 2025-2026 filings are not yet fully published, re-run this landscape in two to three quarters to see whether the flat trend holds or breaks.
Set a monitoring alert in Eureka →Common questions on HTGR core design patents
Within the specific search scope used here — prismatic core, pebble bed core, core neutronics and fuel assembly claims under IPC classes G21C1/07, G21C5 and G21C3 — only five patent families have published between 2015 and mid-2026. This is a narrow slice of the broader nuclear reactor patent universe, not a count of all HTGR-related filings globally. Broader searches that drop the IPC or keyword restrictions would surface a larger set, but within this technical boundary the claim space is genuinely thin.
The corpus lists five assignees across five families, including General Atomics, Purdue Research Foundation, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and a specialist reactor manufacturer, each holding roughly one family apiece. No assignee shows recent-year filing momentum, and none has a multi-family lead over the others in this dataset. That pattern — one filing per player — means no single company currently controls the reflector, fuel-assembly or core-neutronics claim space outright.
US20240420856A1, assigned to Purdue Research Foundation and filed in December 2024, claims a fuel-kernel-based HTGR core assembly built from solid and porous structures forming a heterogeneous, tileable repeating unit with a defined heat-removal channel. The claim locks in specific numeric ranges: an in-channel porosity-to-tortuosity ratio of about 0.2 to 0.5, tortuosity of about 1.0 to 1.6, and total solid fraction of about 0.6 to 0.85. Anyone designing a similar encapsulated-kernel channel geometry should check whether their parameters fall inside those bands before assuming clearance.
One record in this corpus — a pebble bed reactor side-reflector design using an uneven inner face to reduce the retarding effect — carries 14 citations, far more than any other filing in the set, whose next-highest citation count is just 2. That gap suggests it established a reference geometry that later reflector work, inside and outside this narrow corpus, keeps citing back to. High citation count in a small corpus is a strong influence signal, but it also reflects the age advantage older filings have simply by being available longer to cite.
The filing trend in this scope is flat, running from zero families in 2017 through a single-family peak in 2024, with no growth visible even at the 2022 midpoint. Combined with only five total families and a jurisdictional spread across Germany, Canada, Japan and the US, this reads as an underfiled, pre-consolidation space rather than a crowded one. That said, publication lags filing by around 18 months, so recent private-sector activity may not yet be visible — a fresh claim-space check before filing is still the safer move.
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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.
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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.