Insulator condition monitoring and pollution flashover patents: who leads and where the field is thinning out
Concentrated at the top. The five leading assignees together hold 66.7% of all 75 records in scope, and the leading ten hold 90.7% — a long tail of single-filing entrants fills the rest. Filings rose from a single record in 2017 to a peak of 6 in 2021, then declined to 2 by 2024 — a 67% drop over that three-year window. 2025 and 2026 counts will keep revising upward as publication catches up with filing dates, so treat the most recent two years as incomplete rather than as evidence of a continued decline.
- 1STATE GRID CORPORATION OF CHINA17
- 2HUBEI XINDESAI INSULATION TECH12
- 3STATE GRID XINJIANG ELECTRIC POWER CO URUMQI ELECTRIC POWER SUPPLY CO8
- 4YUNNAN POWER GRID CO LTD ELECTRIC POWER RES INST8
- 5WUHAN UNIV5
See the full insulator condition and pollution flashover 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 holds the most patents on insulator pollution flashover detection?
The assignee ranking for this dataset is led by a single state grid entity with 17 of the 75 records in scope, well ahead of the fifth-ranked holder at 5. Filing is heavily concentrated: the top five assignees together account for 66.7% of all records, and the top ten reach 90.7%. Beyond that leading group, the remainder of the 57 ranked assignees each hold only one or two filings, forming a long tail rather than a second tier of comparable size.
Is patent filing on insulator condition monitoring slowing down?
Filing peaked at 6 records in 2021 and had fallen to 2 by 2024, a 67% decline over that span, which is the most recent period the data can treat as reasonably complete. Publication typically lags actual filing by around 18 months, so the 2025 and 2026 counts in the raw trend will keep revising upward and should not yet be read as continued decline. Whether the 2021-2024 drop reflects a genuine slowdown in R&D or a shift toward fewer but more strategic filings is not something filing counts alone can answer.
What technology areas dominate insulator pollution patent claims?
Two IPC subclasses anchor the field: H01B, covering cables, conductors and insulators, appears in 40.0% of the 75 records, and G01R, covering electric and magnetic measurement, appears in 33.3%. Coatings and materials claims under C09D cover a further 20.0%, marking a distinct materials-science branch from the measurement and hardware core. AI-based classification methods under G06N appear in only 10.7% of records, a smaller share than the research attention on machine-learning approaches might suggest.
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 Insulator Condition and Pollution Flashover 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.