The dataset of 189 patent families shows filing activity concentrated among a mix of established compressor manufacturers, including Burckhardt Compression and Dresser-Rand, alongside a cluster of individual inventors who co-file repeatedly. No single assignee dominates the full count; the field looks more like a moderately fragmented space than one controlled by one or two players. Anyone assessing competitive position should look at the full assignee ranking rather than assume the most-cited patent holder is also the most active current filer, since citation counts favour older records.

Filings peaked at 17 in 2020 and had fallen back to 8 by the 2022 midpoint, with no clear recovery since. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the low counts shown for 2025 and 2026 understate real activity, but the multi-year trend before that lag window still points to a flattening rather than continued growth. This suggests the core mechanical claim space was substantially staked out in the late 2010s.

F04B, the positive-displacement pump subclass, accounts for 127 of the 189 records in this dataset, far ahead of valve sealing under F16K (34 records) and piston/seal/gasket hardware under F16J (29 records). That concentration means broad pump-body sealing claims face dense prior art, while narrower valve or packing-ring claims sit in comparatively less crowded territory.

US20220372962A1, assigned to Burckhardt Compression AG and published in November 2022, claims a packing seal for a piston compressor that combines a magnetic bearing with a chamber ring and sealing ring arranged along the seal's longitudinal axis, using at least one controllable electromagnet. It blocks designs that combine an active magnetic bearing with that specific chamber-ring sealing arrangement, but it does not cover packing seals using passive bearings or different ring geometries. Anyone designing near this claim should check the specific magnetic bearing and chamber ring language against their own seal architecture rather than assume all packing seals are covered.

The United States leads with 54 records, followed by the European Patent Office at 29, WIPO/PCT filings at 21, Japan at 15, China at 13 and Canada at 10. The gap between US and China filing volume is notable given China's manufacturing base in this equipment category, and it is worth confirming whether that reflects genuinely lower filing activity there or simply a translation or database coverage gap before relying on it for freedom-to-operate conclusions.