Osmotically Assisted RO Patents: Who Leads, Where the Gaps Are 2026
- One assignee, Battelle Memorial Institute, holds 31 of the records the ranking covers while the next four ranked assignees hold two apiece — a leader-and-tail structure rather than a competitive field.
- Filing peaked in 2017 at 17 records and has not returned there since the 2022 midpoint sits at just 5, pointing to a technology that had its filing burst early and has cooled.
- Every record in scope carries a B01D separation-process class but only 31.4% also touch C02F water-treatment classes, showing most claims are written as membrane-stage mechanics rather than treatment-system integration.
Filing growth compares 2021 (1 records) with 2024 (0) — 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.
What this landscape covers
Osmotically assisted reverse osmosis (OARO) and related high-salinity RO approaches address a hard physical limit: conventional single-pass RO cannot push past the osmotic pressure of the feed without membrane or module failure. The patent record in scope covers systems that reduce the osmotic pressure differential across the membrane by staging draw solutions in cross-current or counterflow arrangements, letting operators reach higher recovery and higher solute concentrations without a matching jump in applied pressure. The search string anchors on staged operation, internal concentration polarization, module pressure rating and the energy penalty that these designs are built to reduce.
The 35 records in scope run from 2015 through the 2026 cut-off, with publication understood to lag filing by roughly 18 months — so the most recent year is always the least complete. Filing offices skew toward the United States, Australia and India, with a meaningful share routed through the WIPO PCT track, consistent with technology still being positioned for multiple national phases rather than settled into a single home jurisdiction.
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Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 35-record set: how filing activity has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses the claims sit in.
A 2017 peak that has not repeated
Filings hit 17 in 2017, the high point of the whole window, then fell back toward a midpoint of 5 in 2022. That pattern reads as an early concentrated push — likely tied to the foundational cross-current staged RO filings — rather than a steadily building field. Because 2026 is a partial year, its zero count should not be read as a stop; it reflects the publication lag, not necessarily an end to filing.
Membrane mechanics dominate over system integration
All 35 records in scope classify under B01D, the separation-processes class covering the membrane and staging hardware itself. Only 31.4% (11 of 35) also carry a C02F water-treatment class, and 11.4% (4 of 35) touch F03G, a spring/motor class likely tied to energy-recovery mechanisms. The gap between 100% and 31.4% suggests most applicants are claiming the RO stage in isolation rather than as part of a described treatment train.
Shares are the percentage of the 35 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Osmotically Assisted and High-Salinity Reverse Osmosis with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about osmotically assisted and high-salinity reverse osmosis and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaThe documents anchoring this field
WO2017213992A3 — Multistage osmotically assisted reverse osmosis system and method
The filing describes routing the concentrated liquid output from the high-pressure side of an RO stage back as the draw solution on the low-pressure side of the same stage — the core osmotically assisted RO configuration. Arranging multiple such stages in a cross-current pattern lowers the osmotic pressure differential the membrane has to work against, which permits higher solute concentrations and reduced system pressures compared with conventional staged RO.Filed by Battelle Memorial Institute; published 2018-01-18.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20170349465A1 | Cross current staged reverse osmosis | 31 |
| 2 | US20170349467A1 | Cross current staged reverse osmosis | 22 |
| 3 | US10214438B2 | Cross current staged reverse osmosis | 8 |
| 4 | WO2017213992A2 | Cross current staged reverse osmosis | 8 |
| 5 | US10214437B2 | Cross current staged reverse osmosis | 8 |
| 6 | US20170349466A1 | Cross current staged reverse osmosis | 2 |
| 7 | WO2023205416A1 | Systems and methods for osmotically assisted reverse osmosis configurations | 1 |
| 8 | US20220315469A1 | Cross current staged reverse osmosis | 1 |
| 9 | EP3471862A2 | Multistage osmotically assisted reverse osmosis system and method | 1 |
Citation counts favour older records in a searched corpus; treat this as a signal of influence on the field, not of current technical importance.
Publication numbers are shown where the record carries one (9 of 9 rows); clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Browse MCP servers →What the data means for a filing decision
Three read-throughs from the trend, the citation table and the class composition.
The early burst has not been repeated
The filing trend shows a sharp 2017 peak followed by a decline through the following years. That is consistent with a foundational set of cross-current staged RO patents establishing the core architecture early, with later filers building narrower improvements rather than re-opening the base configuration.
Citations cluster on the cross-current staged family
The most-cited records in scope are variants of the same cross-current staged reverse osmosis filing family, with citation counts stepping down sharply after the first two entries. That concentration signals these documents set the reference architecture other applicants had to design around or cite.
Claims sit on the membrane stage, not the plant
Every record in scope classifies under B01D, but barely a third also carry a C02F water-treatment class. That gap points to an opening for claims that integrate OARO staging into a described pretreatment or brine-management train, an area the current filings mostly leave untouched.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to osmotically assisted and high-salinity reverse osmosis, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who holds the claim space
The assignee ranking returns five entities for this search, not a broader top-50 or top-100 list. One name accounts for the large majority of the ranked records; the rest hold a handful each.
Battelle Memorial Institute
Battelle Memorial Institute holds the large majority of records in the assignee ranking, including the most-cited cross-current staged RO family that anchors this landscape. No recent-year filings are recorded for this assignee in the latest year tracked.
MIT
MIT appears in the ranked assignee list alongside the Battelle-led filings, reflecting continued academic research interest in osmotically assisted configurations even as commercial filing activity has cooled.
Purdue Research Foundation, Warsinger and Das
Purdue Research Foundation, David Martin Warsinger and Abhimanyu Das appear together across three overlapping co-assignee pairs, each pair sharing two records — a pattern consistent with a single academic research group filing jointly rather than separate competing entities.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Battelle Memorial Institute | 0 | — |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | 0 | — |
| Purdue Research Foundation | 0 | — |
| WARSINGER DAVID MARTIN | 0 | — |
| DAS ABHIMANYU | 0 | — |
Where to take this analysis
The landscape points to a narrow leader-and-tail field with claim density concentrated on membrane-stage mechanics rather than system integration.
Map the citation network around the leading family
The cross-current staged RO filings anchor most of the citation activity in this dataset. Tracing which later filings cite them, and on what claim elements, clarifies how much design freedom remains around the core staged architecture.
Explore citation mapping in EurekaModel a claim in the under-claimed integration space
The gap between 100% B01D coverage and 31.4% C02F coverage suggests room to claim OARO staging as part of a described pretreatment or brine-management system rather than the membrane stage alone.
Draft a claim scenario in EurekaCommon questions on this landscape
Osmotically assisted reverse osmosis (OARO) routes the concentrated output from one RO stage's high-pressure side back as the draw solution on the low-pressure side of the same or a paired stage. This lowers the osmotic pressure differential the membrane must work against, which is the practical ceiling that limits how far a conventional single-pass RO system can concentrate a feed stream. The result, per the representative filing in this dataset, is higher achievable solute concentrations and reduced applied system pressure compared with conventional staged RO, at a lower energy penalty.
The assignee ranking for this search returns five entities, and one of them, Battelle Memorial Institute, accounts for 31 of the records the ranking covers. The remaining four ranked assignees, including MIT, Purdue Research Foundation and two individual inventors, hold two records each. This is a concentrated leader-and-tail structure rather than a field with several comparably sized competitors, and it is the full ranking the underlying data returns, not a top-50 or top-100 excerpt.
No — filing peaked in 2017 at 17 records and has since declined, with the 2022 midpoint down to 5 records. That is a flat-to-declining trend rather than sustained growth. Because publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, the most recent year on record will always look thinner than it eventually turns out to be, but the multi-year decline from the 2017 peak predates that lag effect.
WO2017213992A3, assigned to Battelle Memorial Institute, describes a multistage OARO system that uses cross-current arrangements of stages, each recycling its own concentrate as draw solution, to reduce osmotic pressure differential and system pressure. It sits among the most-cited records in this dataset, meaning later filers in the space have had to design their claims around or in reference to it. Anyone building a staged, cross-current OARO system should review its specific claim language closely before finalising a design, since it appears to anchor the core architecture other filings in this set build on.
The clearest gap is between membrane-stage claims and system-integration claims: every record in scope carries a B01D separation-process classification, but only 31.4% of the 35 records also carry a C02F water-treatment class. That means most current claims describe the RO staging hardware in isolation rather than as part of a pretreatment, brine-management or full-plant system. Sub-areas such as draw-solution recycling control logic, internal concentration polarization mitigation coatings, and energy-recovery motor coupling also show thinner filing density relative to the core staged architecture.
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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.