Superconducting Power Cable Patents: Who Leads, Where Gaps Are 2026
- Filing activity peaked in 2018 at 16 records and has since gone flat, with the 2022 midpoint down to 2 — a technology whose claim space was staked out early and has not reopened.
- Cable and installation claims dominate at 259 and 138 IPC hits, while ceramics (6) and pressure-vessel/cryogenic storage (3) subclasses barely register — most protection sits on the conductor and the trench, not the cooling chemistry or containment hardware.
- The strongest co-filing link pairs Sumitomo Electric Industries with Tokyo Electric Power (21 shared families), a single utility-manufacturer bond that outweighs every other collaboration in the dataset by a wide margin.
What this landscape covers
Superconducting power cable patenting spans HTS tape cable construction, cryostat cooling systems, fault-current-limiting cable designs and the connector and joint hardware that ties a superconducting run into a conventional grid. The 300 families tracked here were pulled under IPC classes covering cables and conductors, cable installation, and other solid-state electric devices — a scope wide enough to catch conductor metallurgy, coolant-flow engineering and the semiconductor-adjacent work on superconducting joints.
Filing has been publication-lag affected in the most recent year, so the true 2025-2026 filing level is understated in any trend line built from publication dates. Read the shape of the curve, not the last data point, when judging whether activity is actually slowing.
Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 300-family dataset: how filing volume has moved year over year, and how that volume splits across the IPC subclasses that make up a superconducting cable system.
A peak in 2018, then a flat tail
Filings rose from zero in 2017 to a peak of 16 in 2018, then fell back toward the low single digits by the 2022 midpoint. That pattern reads as a technology whose core claim positions were staked early in the period rather than one still building momentum — treat any apparent uptick in the final one to two years with caution given publication lag.
Cable and conductor claims dominate; cooling hardware is thin
H01B (cables, conductors and insulators) and H02G (cable installation) carry the bulk of the filings at 259 and 138 hits respectively, with H10N and H01L capturing the solid-state and semiconductor-adjacent joint and junction work. Ceramics (C04B, 6 hits) and pressure-vessel/gas-storage classes (F17C, 3 hits) are barely represented, which is notable given how central coolant containment and cryogenic engineering are to a working system.
Shares are the percentage of the 300 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Superconducting Power Cable Technology Landscape with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about superconducting power cable technology landscape and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaThe records other filings build on
Superconducting cable, superconducting cable line, method of installing superconducting cable, and method of operating superconducting cable line
A superconducting cable includes a superconducting conductor layer and a flow path of a coolant cooling the superconducting conductor layer to a superconducting state. The cable includes a core with the superconducting conductor layer and an insulating layer, a coolant tube forming a coolant flow path arranged in parallel to the core, and a housing tube for the core and the coolant tube.Filed by Sumitomo Electric Industries; the abstract's core structure — conductor layer, parallel coolant tube, shared housing — recurs across much of the later cable-construction filing in this dataset.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US5932523A | Superconducting cable conductor | 103 |
| 2 | US6262375B1 | Room temperature dielectric HTSC cable | 82 |
| 3 | US6271474B1 | Methods of manufacturing oxide superconducting stranded wire and oxide superconducting cable conductor, and c… | 62 |
| 4 | US20140221213A1 | Superconducting cable, superconducting cable line, method of installing superconducting cable, and method of … | 58 |
| 5 | US20100099570A1 | Superconductor cable | 46 |
| 6 | US6313408B1 | High TC superconducting cable conductor employing oxide superconductor | 40 |
| 7 | US20040211586A1 | Superconducting cable termination | 37 |
| 8 | US8437819B2 | Superconductor cable | 32 |
| 9 | US20060175078A1 | Super-conductive cable | 31 |
| 10 | US20130199821A1 | Fixation structure of superconducting cable and fixation structure of superconducting cable line | 30 |
Citation counts are drawn from within this searched corpus and skew toward older, foundational filings; a low count on a recent record does not mean it is unimportant.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Three read-throughs from the trend, the IPC split and the citation table, aimed at someone deciding where new claim work still has room.
The core claim space was staked out early
Activity built through the first years of the window, peaked in 2018, and fell to a fraction of that level by the midpoint. New entrants filing broad conductor-layer or coolant-flow claims now are filing into a crowded prior-art set rather than an open field.
Containment and cryogenic hardware is thinly claimed
The dataset's protection is heavily weighted toward the conductor and the installed cable run; the pressure-vessel and gas-storage side of cryogenic containment carries almost no dedicated filing. That imbalance is a claim-drafting signal as much as a technology one.
Influence sits with a handful of 1990s-2000s filings
The most-cited records in this corpus date from the earliest superconducting-conductor and dielectric-cable work; later filings cite back to them repeatedly. That concentration reflects age and corpus structure more than current commercial relevance.
One utility-manufacturer pairing dwarfs the rest
Ten co-assignee pairs appear in the dataset, but the strongest by a wide margin links a cable manufacturer directly to a utility operator. Other pairs, including research-institute collaborations, sit an order of magnitude lower.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to superconducting power cable technology landscape, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who holds the claim space
Filing activity concentrates among a small set of cable manufacturers and utilities, with momentum flat across the board in the most recent tracked year.
A manufacturer-utility bond, not a single dominant filer
Rather than one assignee running away with the field, the strongest signal in the dataset is a direct collaboration between a cable manufacturer and the utility that would deploy the result — a structure worth noting when assessing freedom to operate around either party.
No filer shows recent-year growth
Every major assignee tracked, including Sumitomo Electric, Furukawa Electric, Tokyo Electric Power, Nexans, Prysmian Cavi e Sistemi and LS Cable & System, shows zero filings in the latest tracked year. Given publication lag this likely understates true recent activity across the board rather than pointing to any one firm slowing relative to peers.
Smaller collaboration clusters exist outside the lead pairing
A research-institute pairing and a manufacturer-institute pairing each show modest co-filing activity, suggesting pockets of joint development activity distinct from the dominant utility-manufacturer relationship.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd. | 0 | — |
| Furukawa Electric Co., Ltd. | 0 | — |
| Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, Inc. | 0 | — |
| Nexans | 0 | — |
| Prysmian Cavi e Sistemi S.r.l. | 0 | — |
| LS CABLE & SYST LTD | 0 | — |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | 0 | — |
| Prysmian Cables and Systems Energy S.r.l. | 0 | — |
Where to take this
The trend and composition data point to a field with settled core claims and thinner coverage at the cooling and containment edges.
Check freedom to operate around the manufacturer-utility cluster
The Sumitomo Electric / Tokyo Electric Power pairing anchors the densest citation and co-filing activity in this dataset. Any conductor-layer or coolant-flow claim should be checked against this cluster first.
Explore assignee claims in EurekaLook at the thin IPC branches before drafting
Pressure-vessel and ceramic-dielectric classes carry a fraction of the filing density of the core cable classes. That gap is either genuine white space or a sign the containment engineering is being claimed elsewhere — worth checking before assuming either.
Run a white-space search in EurekaRe-run the trend once recent filings publish
The flat 2022-2026 tail is partly a publication-lag artefact. Revisiting the filing trend in twelve to eighteen months will separate genuine slowdown from filings still working through the pipeline.
Set a monitoring alert in EurekaCommon questions on superconducting power cable patents
The dataset's strongest signal is not a single dominant filer but a co-filing relationship: Sumitomo Electric Industries and Tokyo Electric Power Holdings share 21 families together, the largest co-assignee link found. Furukawa Electric, Nexans, Prysmian Cavi e Sistemi and LS Cable & System also appear as recurring filers. Because filing activity across every one of these assignees sits at zero in the latest tracked year, ranking them by recent momentum alone is unreliable; cumulative family counts are the safer basis for comparison.
Filing peaked in 2018 at 16 records in this dataset and had fallen to just 2 by the 2022 midpoint, a pattern consistent with a technology whose core claims were staked early rather than one still expanding. Publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, so the most recent one to two years in any trend understate true activity. Even accounting for that lag, the multi-year decline from the 2018 peak looks like a genuine slowdown rather than a reporting artefact.
Cable and conductor construction (IPC class H01B, 259 hits) and cable installation methods (H02G, 138 hits) carry by far the most filing density in this dataset. Solid-state and semiconductor-adjacent joint work (H10N and H01L) also shows meaningful activity. By contrast, ceramics and refractory materials (C04B) and pressure-vessel or gas-storage classes (F17C) are barely claimed, at 6 and 3 hits respectively, despite their relevance to cryogenic containment.
The clearest gap sits around cryogenic containment engineering and ceramic dielectric coolant interfaces, both of which show minimal IPC density compared to the dominant cable and installation classes. Fault-current-limiting joint hardware and coolant-tube pressure engineering also look thin relative to the volume of conductor-layer filing. A first claim in these areas would need to tie the containment or joint structure specifically to a cooling or fault-limiting function, rather than restating the general cable architecture already covered by dense prior art.
US20140221213A1, filed by Sumitomo Electric Industries, claims a superconducting cable built around a superconducting conductor layer, a coolant flow path cooling that layer, and a specific physical arrangement — a core containing the conductor and insulating layer, a coolant tube running parallel to the core, and a shared housing tube enclosing both. It matters because that parallel-coolant-tube-and-shared-housing structure recurs across much of the later cable-construction filing in this dataset, making it a useful reference point for checking whether a new conductor-cooling design reads onto an existing structural claim rather than a genuinely different arrangement.
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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.