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CPC technology class · F16

F16N — Lubricating

Lubricating. 1,760 US utility patents granted 2015–2025, with the leading assignees and year-by-year filing trajectory.

1,760
US patents granted
F16
Parent CPC class
20
Active assignees
+65%
5-yr velocity
Top assignee: PRATT & WHITNEY CANADA CORP. (56 patents)

CPC subclass F16N — LUBRICATING — covers 1,760 US utility patents granted between 2015 and 2025 according to USPTO PatentsView records. This subclass sits within the broader CPC class F16 (ENGINEERING ELEMENTS AND UNITS; GENERAL MEASURES FOR PRODUCING AND MAINTAINING EFFECTIVE FUNCTIONING OF MACHINES OR INSTALLATIONS; THERMAL INSULATION IN GENERAL), one of roughly 250 top-level technology categories in the Cooperative Patent Classification system jointly maintained by the USPTO and the European Patent Office. At the subclass level, four-character codes like F16N give the most practical resolution for tracking a specific technology domain without losing sight of adjacent filings. Every grant here has been classified by a USPTO examiner based on the technical disclosure in the patent specification.

The competitive landscape in F16N is shaped by 20 distinct companies actively filing in this space. PRATT & WHITNEY CANADA CORP. leads with 56 patents, followed by Lincoln Industrial Corporation at 53 grants and Graco Minnesota Inc. at 517. Concentration at the top of the leaderboard indicates whether this technology area is dominated by a handful of incumbents or fragmented across many filers — a useful signal for investors evaluating competitive moats and for product teams mapping freedom-to-operate risk.

Filing trajectory matters as much as static counts. The yearly series on this page plots grants from 2015 through 2025, highlighting whether innovation in F16N is accelerating, plateauing, or cooling. Technology areas with rising post-2020 activity often reflect emerging markets or new platform shifts, while declining filings can signal mature domains where incremental improvement has slowed. Researchers, licensing professionals, and competitive-intelligence teams use these patterns — together with the top-assignee distribution — to decide where to invest, where to license, and where to avoid entanglement. All counts on this page come directly from USPTO PatentsView and reflect US granted utility patents only.

Is F16N innovation accelerating?

US utility-patent grants per year in F16N, 2015–2025 — recent five years are up 65% versus 2015–2019.

100120140160180200 20152016201720182019202020212022202320242025 137

Who leads F16N?

The 12 most active assignees in LUBRICATING — wider bars mean more grants

patents

What this shows Pratt & Whitney Canada is the most active filer in F16N, holding 56 of the 1,760 patents in this class. Concentration at the top signals how contestable this technology area is for new entrants.

Source USPTO PatentsView — granted utility patents As of 2015–2025 grant years
View data table
Top patent holders in CPC subclass F16N
Rank Company Patents in F16N
#1 PRATT & WHITNEY CANADA CORP. 2,008
#2 Lincoln Industrial Corporation 53
#3 Graco Minnesota Inc. 517
#4 SKF LUBRICATION SYSTEMS GERMANY GMBH 36
#5 Cummins Filtration IP, Inc. 316
#6 Downing Wellhead Equipment, LLC 29
#7 DROPSA S.p.A. 14
#8 Yantai Jereh Petroleum Equipment & Technologies Co., Ltd. 161
#9 RPM INDUSTRIES, LLC 29
#10 MANN+HUMMEL GmbH 639
#11 PERMA-TEC GMBH & CO. KG 10
#12 SAFRAN AERO BOOSTERS 138
#13 Castrol Limited 51
#14 Ingersoll-Rand Company 194
#15 GE AVIO S.R.L. 179
#16 SAFRAN TRANSMISSION SYSTEMS 146
#17 C.C. Jensen A/S 15
#18 Edwards Limited 173
#19 DANA ITALIA S.R.L. 91
#20 PETROMAC IP LIMITED 21

About This Class

CPC subclass F16N belongs to class F16.

1,760 patents were granted in this class between 2015 and 2025.

20 companies actively patent in this space.

Classification System

Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) is a hierarchical patent classification system used by the USPTO and EPO.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is CPC class F16N?
CPC subclass F16N covers LUBRICATING. It belongs to CPC class F16 (ENGINEERING ELEMENTS AND UNITS; GENERAL MEASURES FOR PRODUCING AND MAINTAINING EFFECTIVE FUNCTIONING OF MACHINES OR INSTALLATIONS; THERMAL INSULATION IN GENERAL). The Cooperative Patent Classification is a hierarchical system used by the USPTO and European Patent Office to categorize patents by technology.
How many patents have been filed in F16N?
1,760 US utility patents were granted in CPC subclass F16N between 2015 and 2025, based on USPTO PatentsView data.
Which company holds the most patents in F16N?
PRATT & WHITNEY CANADA CORP. leads F16N with 56 patents, making it the most active assignee in this technology area.
How is patent data for F16N collected?
Patent data comes from USPTO PatentsView, a public research dataset maintained by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. It covers all US granted utility patents and assigns CPC codes based on the technology described in each patent.
What is the difference between CPC class and subclass?
A CPC class (e.g., F16) is a broad technology category. Subclasses like F16N provide finer granularity within that category. PlainPatent organizes data at the subclass level (4-character codes) for the most useful view of technology domains.

Learn More

How to Read Patent Data

Understand CPC codes, patent claims, and key metrics
How Innovation Score Works

The composite metric behind company scoring
Patent Moat Analysis

How patents create competitive barriers

Explore the patent dataset

Pratt & Whitney Canada

The leading filer in F16N — full patent portfolio
All technology classes

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Technology leaders

Which companies lead each technology field
How to read CPC data

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Read our methodology — how this data is sourced, computed, and verified.

Data sourced from USPTO PatentsView — official U.S. government patent data. See our methodology for computation details. Retrieved and formatted by PlainPatent Editorial