Ship Air Lubrication Patents: Who Leads, Where the Gaps Are 2026
- 27 families, one dominant citation cluster. the 'air lubrication system and vessel' construction (WO2015133900A1 and its US/EP counterparts) draws far more citations than anything else filed.
- Filings peaked late, in 2024 at 9. after a flat stretch through the 2022 midpoint, activity is concentrated in the most recent tracked years rather than building steadily since 2015.
- Claims sit almost entirely in B63B hull hardware. auxiliary-system, boiler-linked and digital-control branches each have only a single filed record, leaving those boundaries largely unclaimed.
What ship air lubrication patents actually cover
Ship air lubrication systems reduce hull friction by generating a layer of microbubbles or an air cavity between the hull surface and surrounding water, cutting the drag a vessel’s engines have to overcome. The patent corpus for this topic is small — 27 families published between 2015 and the 2026 cut-off — and it classifies almost entirely under B63B, the IPC subclass covering ships and marine vessels generally, rather than spreading across a wide set of adjacent technology areas.
That concentration means the field's foundational claims — how air is generated, distributed and released beneath the hull — were staked out early by a small number of filers, and later entrants have mostly built narrower, apparatus-level improvements on top, such as foam release mechanisms, rather than contesting the core system claim itself.
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Filing trends and technology classification
Twenty-seven patent families make up the searched corpus, filed across six receiving offices between 2015 and the 2026 data cut-off. The classification and trend data below show where claim activity has concentrated and where it has not.
Filing activity: a late peak on a small base
Filings sat flat through the mid-2010s, stayed at zero through the 2022 midpoint, then rose to a peak of 9 families in 2024. The most recent year is necessarily undercounted because publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, so 2025-2026 figures will revise upward as those applications publish.
Classification: almost entirely ship-hull hardware
B63B (ships and marine vessels) covers all 27 records in the set, with single-record spillover into B63J (ship auxiliaries), F22B (steam generation and boilers) and H04L (digital information transmission). That spillover marks the only points where air lubrication claims have touched auxiliary power generation or digital control, and neither has a second filer yet.
Shares are the percentage of the 27 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Ship Air Lubrication Technology Landscape with Eureka
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Try EurekaKey patents shaping the claim landscape
Ship Hull Air Lubrication System Foam Release Apparatus and Method of Use (US12187385B1)
A foam release apparatus for use in conjunction with a vessel air lubrication system has a chamber intersected by and in fluid communication with the air lubrication system return pipe and one or more sloped release channels formed within the lower portion of the chamber opposite the return pipe chamber inlet, each release channel terminating in a respective release slot formed in the vessel hull so as to fluidly communicate between the chamber and the water boundary layer beneath the hull via the release channels and release slots.Assigned to Giles Environmental LLC; granted 7 January 2025. The claim is narrow to the chamber-and-channel geometry rather than to foam release generally.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | WO2015133900A1 | Air lubrication system and vessel comprising such a system | 10 |
| 2 | US9862459B2 | Air lubrication system and vessel comprising such a system | 2 |
| 3 | EP2915736A1 | Air lubrication system and vessel comprising such a system | 2 |
| 4 | US12187385B1 | Ship hull air lubrication system foam release apparatus and method of use | 1 |
Ranked by citation count within the searched corpus; older records accumulate citations more readily and should be read as influence markers, not current importance.
Publication numbers are shown where the record carries one (4 of 4 rows); clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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With only 27 families in the corpus, citation concentration and IPC spillover are more informative than raw volume. Both point to a field where one early construction still sets the terms of the art.
One construction anchors the field
WO2015133900A1 and its US/EP counterparts (US9862459B2, EP2915736A1) hold the highest citation counts in the corpus by a wide margin. New filings in this space are effectively drafting around, or referencing, this single system-and-vessel construction.
No single filing hub
Filings split across EPO, Singapore, WIPO/PCT, Hong Kong, the United States and China, with no office exceeding 4 filings. That spread suggests applicants are pursuing multi-jurisdiction protection early rather than testing a single home market first.
Claims cluster on hull hardware
Every record in the set touches B63B (ships and marine vessels). Only one record each spills into ship auxiliaries, boiler/steam generation, and digital transmission — those boundaries remain functionally unclaimed beyond a single filing.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to ship air lubrication technology landscape, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who is filing, and where the claim space is still open
Twenty-seven families is a small enough set that individual assignee behaviour is visible directly in the data, rather than needing to be inferred from aggregate share. Recent-year momentum figures show most named assignees at zero filings in the latest tracked year, which is a useful check against assuming any one player is currently active.
The earliest system claim still leads
The WO2015133900A1 family and its US/EP counterparts remain the most-cited records in the corpus, meaning later filers have consistently had to reference or design around this construction rather than the reverse.
Apparatus-level filing, not a system claim
Giles Environmental LLC's foam release patent is a narrow, structural improvement — a specific chamber-and-channel geometry — filed against the existing air lubrication system category rather than contesting it.
Activity has cooled since the 2024 peak
Assignees including Kongsberg Maritime Finland and Maersk show zero filings in the most recent tracked year, and Maersk's data point shows a -100% year-on-year change, consistent with a corpus that peaked in 2024 and has not sustained that pace.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Silver Stream Technology | 0 | — |
| Kongsberg Maritime Finland | 0 | — |
| GILES ENVIRONMENTAL LLC | 0 | — |
| Maersk | 0 | -100% |
| Giles Environmental LLC | 0 | — |
| ABRALIN SOFTECH PTE LTD | 0 | — |
Where to take this analysis
The data here identifies concentration and gaps; deciding whether to file, license or challenge requires drilling into specific claim language and assignee portfolios.
Check freedom-to-operate against the top-cited family
Before drafting in the hull air-cavity space, map your proposed claim against WO2015133900A1 and its US/EP counterparts to see exactly where the boundary of the existing system claim sits.
Explore the citation network in EurekaDraft into the under-claimed boundaries
The B63J and F22B single-record branches are open enough that a well-scoped first claim combining air-generation source with release geometry could establish a defensible position.
Build a claim chart in EurekaFrequently asked questions
The searched corpus contains 27 patent families published between 2015 and the mid-2026 data cut-off. That is a small, concentrated field rather than a crowded one. Nearly all of these families classify under IPC subclass B63B (ships and marine vessels), with only isolated single-record filings touching auxiliary systems, boiler-linked air generation, or digital control. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the true 2025-2026 count is likely higher than what is currently visible.
Filing activity in this dataset is spread across a small number of assignees rather than dominated by one, with the highest-cited family — the 'air lubrication system and vessel comprising such a system' construction — appearing under related US, EP and WO filings. Several named assignees, including Kongsberg Maritime Finland, Maersk and Giles Environmental, show up in recent-year momentum data, but most report zero filings in the latest tracked year. That pattern suggests early positions were staked out and have not been aggressively extended since.
US12187385B1, assigned to Giles Environmental LLC and issued in January 2025, claims a specific foam release apparatus for air lubrication systems: a chamber intersected by the system's return pipe, with sloped release channels in the chamber's lower portion terminating in hull-mounted release slots that connect to the water boundary layer beneath the vessel. It does not claim foam handling in air lubrication broadly — only this particular chamber-and-channel geometry. Systems that vent foam through a different structural path would need separate analysis but are not automatically blocked by this claim.
The clearest gaps sit at the edges of the core B63B hull-hardware claims: the boundary with B63J (ship auxiliaries) and F22B (boiler and steam generation) each have exactly one filed record, meaning no filer has built a claim thicket combining air-generation source with hull release geometry. Digital monitoring and control of bubble distribution is similarly under-claimed, with only one record touching H04L. A first filer combining a specific air-generation method with active, sensor-driven release control would be filing into largely open space.
On the filing-year data available, activity is best described as flat-to-declining through the mid-2010s and early 2020s, followed by a late peak of 9 families in 2024. It is not a steadily growing field on this evidence. Readers should treat the most recent one to two years as understated, since patent publication typically trails filing by about 18 months, so any conclusion about a slowdown in 2025-2026 specifically would be premature.
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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.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
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.