Offshore Floating Wind Ballast Patents: Leaders & White Space 2026
- Filing has cooled after a 2024 peak. Seven families published in 2024, the high point of the series, with the partial 2026 count showing nothing yet filed — consistent with the usual 18-month publication lag rather than a real drop-off.
- Claims cluster in two IPC subclasses at once. 43 of 53 families sit in F03D (wind turbines) and 37 in B63B (marine vessels), and many records carry both codes — the core contested ground is where turbine loads meet hull and mooring design.
- The most-cited family is a single platform architecture. One 'optimized transfer of wave and wind loads' platform structure and its continuations account for the four most-cited records in the set, a strong signal of where downstream designers have had to design around.
Filing growth compares 2021 (5 records) with 2024 (7) — 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 53 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this landscape covers
This landscape tracks patent families at the intersection of floating offshore wind platforms and the ballast, stability and motion-damping systems that keep them upright and productive in open water. The search combines floating-platform terminology with stability-specific claim language, filtered to the IPC classes that cover wind turbine structures, ships and marine vessels, and hydraulic/waterway engineering — narrowing the corpus to systems-level stability art rather than generic turbine or mooring filings.
Coverage runs from 2015 through the 2026-07-31 cut-off, with 53 published families in total. Because publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, the 2025 and 2026 counts in the trend chart understate actual filing activity in those years.
Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 53-family corpus: how filing activity has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses carry the claims.
Filings rose to a 2024 peak, then dropped off in the partial data
From 3 families in 2017 to a peak of 7 in 2024, the series is flat-to-declining at the midpoint (2022 = 2) rather than showing sustained growth — read the empty 2026 bar as a reporting gap, not a stop in activity.
F03D and B63B dominate; E02B is a secondary layer
43 families touch wind-turbine classification (F03D) and 37 touch marine vessels (B63B), with substantial overlap between the two. E02B (hydraulic/waterway engineering) appears in 15 families, typically where anchoring or foundation-adjacent claims are involved; F03B and H02P appear only once each, marking genuinely marginal territory.
Shares are the percentage of the 53 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Offshore Floating Wind Ballast and Stability with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about offshore floating wind ballast and stability and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaThe most-cited records in this corpus
Floating wind turbine assembly with crossing tensioned mooring lines
The representative record describes a floating platform carrying a wind turbine mast and nacelle, moored to the seafloor by tensioned lines whose axes are arranged to cross at or above the nacelle elevation on the mast axis. The geometry is claimed specifically as a stability mechanism: crossing tensioned lines at that elevation resist the overturning moment created by wind and wave loading on the turbine.Filed by Single Buoy Moorings Inc., published 2018-06-21.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20160369780A1 | Floating wind turbine platform structure with optimized transfer of wave and wind loads | 51 |
| 2 | US20180051677A1 | Floating wind turbine platform structure with optimized transfer of wave and wind loads | 24 |
| 3 | US9810204B2 | Floating wind turbine platform structure with optimized transfer of wave and wind loads | 23 |
| 4 | WO2016205746A1 | Floating wind turbine platform structure with optimized transfer of wave and wind loads | 16 |
| 5 | US20180170490A1 | Floating wind turbine assembly, as well as a method for mooring such a floating wind turbine assembly | 12 |
| 6 | US10180129B2 | Coordinated control of a floating wind turbine | 10 |
| 7 | US10174744B2 | Semi-submersible floating wind turbine platform structure with water entrapment plates | 7 |
| 8 | US10087913B2 | Controlling motions of floating wind turbines | 7 |
| 9 | US10661862B2 | Floating wind turbine assembly, as well as a method for mooring such a floating wind turbine assembly | 5 |
| 10 | WO2024172662A1 | Floating wind turbine foundation | 4 |
Citation counts are drawn from a bounded searched corpus and skew toward older filings — read them as a signal of influence on later filers, not 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 say about where this field stands
Three read-throughs from the filing and citation data, useful for deciding where fresh claim space still exists.
Growth has plateaued, not accelerated
The series moved from 3 families in 2017 to a peak of 7 in 2024, with a flat midpoint of 2 in 2022. That is a small, uneven corpus rather than a fast-growing one — treat any single year's count as noisy at this scale.
Stability claims are filed as turbine claims
Most stability and ballast art is classified alongside the turbine structure itself, not as standalone marine engineering. A filer targeting pure hull ballast without turbine-load language risks missing the bulk of relevant prior art.
One platform architecture anchors the citation graph
The four most-cited records in the corpus are variants of the same wave-and-wind-load-transfer platform structure. New entrants building on load-transfer geometry are almost certainly citing, or should be checking against, this lineage.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to offshore floating wind ballast and stability, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who is filing, and where the claim space is still open
Recent-year momentum across the named assignees in this corpus shows no filer with active growth in the latest year — several show zero filings or a year-over-year drop, consistent with the corpus's small size and the publication lag on recent years rather than firms exiting the space.
US filing leads, Europe and PCT follow
The United States receives the largest share of filings (17), ahead of the European Patent Office (9) and WIPO/PCT route (6). Australia, Canada and Denmark each show single-digit counts, marking secondary but active jurisdictions for offshore wind deployment.
Early platform-structure filings set the benchmark
The most-cited record in the set, a floating platform structure optimised for wave and wind load transfer, has been cited 51 times — well ahead of any other single record — making its assignee's lineage the one every downstream platform designer has had to navigate.
No assignee shows active latest-year growth
Every named assignee in the recent-momentum data shows zero filings in the latest year, including at least one with a -100% year-over-year change. This is typical of a small corpus intersecting the ~18-month publication lag, not necessarily a sign of firms leaving the field.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Principle Power, Inc. | 0 | -100% |
| Equinor Energy AS | 0 | — |
| MHI Vestas Offshore Wind A/S | 0 | — |
| ODFJELL OCEANWIND AS | 0 | — |
| Single Buoy Moorings Inc. | 0 | — |
| Vestas Wind Systems A/S | 0 | — |
| The Board of Governors of Colorado State University | 0 | — |
| University of Virginia Patent Foundation | 0 | — |
Where to take this next
The filing and citation data point to a narrow but active field. These are the practical next steps for teams evaluating freedom to operate or fresh filing opportunities.
Map claims against the top-cited platform lineage
Before drafting new platform-stability claims, check the wave-and-wind-load-transfer family and its continuations directly — it anchors more citations than any other record in this corpus and likely defines the boundary of prior art in load-transfer geometry.
Explore the citation networkTest claim language in the under-claimed sub-areas
Active ballast control loops and hydrostatic sensing appear thin relative to the core turbine/vessel claim space. Drafting a first claim there, and checking it against the existing corpus, is a faster way to find open ground than searching the crowded platform-structure classes.
Run a claim comparisonTrack publication as recent filings clear the lag
The 2025-2026 counts will move as filings clear the roughly 18-month publication delay. Re-running this landscape in six to twelve months will give a truer read on whether 2024's peak was a real inflection or a one-year spike.
Set up a monitoring alertCommon questions about this landscape
This landscape identifies 53 published patent families filed between 2015 and the 2026-07-31 data cut-off, matching search terms for floating offshore wind platforms combined with ballast, stability and motion-damping claim language. That is a small, specialised corpus compared with offshore wind generally, reflecting how narrowly this stability-specific niche is claimed. Counts for the most recent one to two years will rise as filings clear the typical 18-month publication lag.
The dataset's recent-year momentum table lists several named assignees, but none show active growth in the latest reported year — most sit at zero filings for that year. The strongest historical signal is citation-based rather than volume-based: a family covering a wave-and-wind-load-transfer platform structure and its continuations dominates the citation graph, making its owner's lineage the reference point other filers have had to work around.
Most families classify under F03D (wind turbine structures, 43 of 53) and B63B (marine vessels, 37 of 53), frequently overlapping, which shows that stability and ballast claims are usually drafted as turbine-integration art rather than pure naval architecture. E02B (hydraulic and waterway engineering) appears in 15 families, mostly tied to anchoring and foundation work. F03B and H02P each appear only once, marking genuinely marginal ground.
Relative to the dense turbine-structure and mooring-geometry claim space, sub-areas such as active ballast pumping control loops, tuned mass motion damping and hydrostatic trim sensing show thinner coverage in this corpus. A first claim in one of these areas, checked carefully against the existing platform-structure lineage, has more room to stand on its own than a new claim on hull or mooring geometry, where prior art is already dense.
The apparent drop is very likely an artefact of publication timing rather than a real slowdown. Patent publication typically lags the actual filing date by around 18 months, so the low counts recorded for 2025 and the empty 2026 bar reflect filings that have not yet published, not a stop in R&D activity. The 2024 peak of 7 families should be read as the most complete recent year in the series, with 2025-2026 numbers expected to revise upward over time.
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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.