Servo valve and hydraulic control component patents: mapping who holds the claims
Concentrated at the top. The five leading assignees together hold 37.6% of all 1,976 records in scope, and the ten leading assignees hold 45.6% — a long tail of single- and few-filing entrants fills the rest. Filings ran near 127-133 a year through 2017-2018, then declined steadily; 2021's 33 records fell to 6 by 2024, an 82% drop. The final one to two years are undercounted because publication trails filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025-2026 should not yet be read as continued decline.
- 1HAMILTON SUNDSTRAND CORP15.7%
- 2MOOG INC7.8%
- 3GENERAL ELECTRIC CO5.6%
- 4HR TEXTRON5.5%
- 5HONEYWELL INTERNATIONAL INC2.9%
See the full servo valves and hydraulic control components 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 about servo valve patents
Who are the leading patent holders in servo valve and hydraulic control technology?
The assignee ranking for this dataset covers 100 companies across 1,976 records, and it is dominated by aerospace actuation and industrial hydraulics specialists rather than a broad spread of newer entrants. The leading assignee alone holds 311 records, well ahead of the fifth-place holder at 58 and tenth place at 29, so the field has one clear leader plus a fast-thinning group behind it. Beyond the ranked leaders, most of the remaining assignees appear with only a handful of filings each, forming a long tail typical of a mature mechanical technology area.
Is servo valve patent filing activity growing or declining?
Filings peaked in 2018 at 133 records and have declined since, falling from 33 in 2021 to 6 in 2024, an 82% drop over that three-year span. That is a genuine slowdown in the last years for which data is essentially complete. However, patent publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, so the very newest years in any dataset understate real activity, and the 2025-2026 figures should not be read as evidence the decline is continuing at the same rate.
What technology areas dominate servo valve patent claims?
Fluid-pressure actuation and mechanical valve hardware dominate: F15B (fluid-pressure actuators and systems) appears on 51.9% of the 1,976 records in scope, and F16K (valves and taps) on 20.5%. Aerospace-specific classes tied to gas-turbine and aircraft applications, F02C and B64C, appear on 9.9% and 7.7% of records respectively, reflecting the flight-control weighting of this search scope. Control-electronics and electromechanical classes such as G05B, G05D, H02K and H01F each sit at or below 6.8%, indicating comparatively lighter claim density around the control-logic and sensing layer.
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 Servo Valves and Hydraulic Control Components 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.