US 11402363

I'll search for authoritative information on this specific patent number.

Let me check for litigation / CAFC docket activity and confirm the USPTO bibliographic record.

US Patent 11,402,363 — Summary

Methodology note: I ran targeted web searches (Google Patents, Justia, general web) rather than a direct authenticated query into USPTO PatentCenter/PACER/CAFC CM-ECF. The bibliographic data below is drawn from the USPTO-derived Google Patents record (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US11402363](/patent/US11402363)/en) and matches the Justia mirror (https://patents.justia.com/patent/11402363). No litigation, IPR/PGR, or Federal Circuit docket entry involving this patent surfaced in my searches — but absence of search hits is not affirmative proof that no such proceeding exists.

Bibliographic data

Continuity chain

• Continuation of Ser. No. 16/186,986 (now US 10,712,327 B2), filed 2018-11-12
• Which is a continuation of Ser. No. 15/706,478 (now US 10,126,284 B1), filed 2017-09-15
• Which claims benefit of provisional 62/395,185, filed 2016-09-15
• A later continuation, Ser. No. 17/878,263, issued as US 12,235,254 B2 (filed 2022-08-01) and lists this patent as its parent.

Abstract (as issued)

"Methods and systems are described for monitoring and managing fluid treatment or storage systems, such as HVAC hydronic water systems. Sensors located at a fluid system can detect various types of data, such as chemical amounts, pressures, temperatures, flow rates, and more. Servers in communication with the sensors can record the data and provide it to a user in a variety of graphical interfaces. One useful interface for display of the data includes a five-sided axis called the OPTI-GON."

Independent claims in plain language

Claim 1 — System for monitoring a fluid system. A set of sensors detects fluid properties; valves route fluid into/out of the system; injection pumps each connect a treatment-substance reservoir to the system. A local controller is wired to the sensors, valves, and pumps, and collects and transmits property data. One or more servers receive that data, compare sensed properties against target values (notifying the user on a mismatch), and generate an overall system status covering (a) sensed properties, (b) the state of each valve, and (c) the status of each treatment-substance reservoir. A client portal displays all three, and lets the user issue a command to change fluid properties via the injection pumps. Notably, the local controller — not the server directly — executes the command by operating the valves and pumps.

Claim 9 — Method for managing fluid(s) in fluid system(s). At the server: receive property data from a local controller that is in communication with sensors on the fluid system; receive the status of the valves and injection pumps; store it all; compare the data against predetermined values; and send a user-requested data subset (including the comparison results) to a client portal. Then: the local controller receives a user command from the client portal to change fluid properties using the injection pumps, and operates the valves and pumps to effect the change.

Claim 17 — System for monitoring and treating an HVAC hydronic water system. The narrowest of the three in terms of setting but the most hardware-specific: a water reservoir; sensors measuring water properties; multiple injection points on the reservoir; valves and injection pumps connected through those injection points; treatment-chemical reservoirs feeding the reservoir through the valves/pumps; a controller electrically connected to sensors, valves, and pumps that collects data and operates the valves/pumps; server(s) comparing properties to target values, notifying the user, and providing status (properties + valve states + reservoir statuses); and a client portal that displays that status, receives a user command, and forwards it to the server, which relays it to the controller for execution.

Dependent claims (brief)

• 2, 13 — client portal / data presented via a graphical interface.
• 3, 14 — the graphical interface includes a five-axis graph: solubility index, chemical residual, steel corrosion rate, copper corrosion rate, saturation index (the specification calls this the "OPTI-GON").
• 4 — a respective actuator per valve; each valve operated by its actuator.
• 5 — sensors enable the server to measure/calculate solubility index, chemical residual, steel and copper corrosion rates, and a saturation index.
• 6, 18 — properties are chemical, electrical, mechanical, or other physical values.
• 7 — injected treatment substance is a chemical changing an ionic, chemical, or physical fluid property.
• 8 — pumps/valves operable by the server(s) to hold a fluid property within a predetermined range.
• 10, 11 — send a map of the fluid systems; color-coded by alarm condition (property outside a predetermined range).
• 12 — the fluid system is a water treatment system.
• 15, 16 — servers create a preventative and a predictive maintenance schedule, respectively.
• 19 — valves/pumps change an ionic, chemical, or physical level of the water by adding treatment substance from a reservoir.

Points of context and uncertainty

• The specification discloses a broad range of applications (boilers, chillers, cooling towers, pools, irrigation, wastewater, fuel/feed tanks, etc.), but the claim set is tied to fluid/HVAC-hydronic hardware with valves and injection pumps, not to purely software reporting.
• The Google Patents record includes a "Definitions"/summary section reflecting the application disclosure; the granted claims differ materially from the BRIEF SUMMARY, notably by adding the local-controller architecture and the valve/reservoir status reporting. Do not conflate the two.
• Board/examiner citations include US 4,830,757 (Mogul, telemetry for water/energy monitoring), US 5,895,565 (Santa Barbara Control Systems, integrated water treatment control with probe failure detection), US 2014/0373926 A1 (Hydronovation, remote monitoring/control of water systems), and US 2010/0245103 A1 (Pvt Solar). A third-party citing document is US 2022/0025880 A1 (Pulsafeeder, pump operating method/system).
• I could not locate any 2025–2026 Federal Circuit appeal, PTAB proceeding, or district-court case naming US 11,402,363 specifically. If you need a definitive litigation/PTAB clearance check, that should be run against PACER/Docket Navigator and the USPTO PTAB API rather than inferred from web search.
• Claim-language quirks worth flagging: claim 1 recites "one or more valves" under a "plurality of sensors" and then refers to "the pluralities of sensors" in the status clause; claim 9 recites "a at least one fluid" (a drafting irregularity). These are as-issued and should be quoted verbatim in any analysis.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 11402363 across patent litigation databases.

Let me try more targeted searches on patent litigation databases.

Let me check Unified Patents and other specialized litigation trackers directly.

I was unable to complete all planned searches (I hit my tool-call limit before querying Unified Patents and PACER directly), but based on the searches I did run, here are my findings.

Summary: No litigation found for US 11,402,363

I found no record of any litigation involving US Patent 11,402,363 in the sources I was able to search. Specifically:

What I searched:

• Google/web searches for "US11402363 patent litigation," "11402363 patent infringement lawsuit," and "US 11,402,363 IPR PTAB"
• Searches for the assignee, "Jentek Water Treatment," combined with "lawsuit," "patent infringement," and "litigation"
• Searches targeting district court records and case numbers

What came back: All hits referring to a "’023 patent" were false positives for a different patent — e.g., an Alcon/LenSx ophthalmology declaratory-judgment action (D. Del.) discussing a "’023 patent" covering a laser scanner, and a case-law excerpt about the Stryker/Osteonics "’023 patent" concerning prosthetic implants. None of these involve US 11,402,363. One unrelated hit was an Orange County Superior Court judgment whose receipt number happened to be 11402363 — also not this patent.

Important caveats

1. I could not directly query PACER, Unified Patents' litigation portal, or Docket Alarm before exhausting my search steps. My conclusion is based on general web search coverage only. A negative result from general web search is not proof of absence — district court complaints and docket entries are frequently not indexed by general search engines.

2. Patent/context facts for grounding (from the authoritative patent text provided):

   • Patent: US 11,402,363 B2, "System and method for monitoring water treatment systems"
   • Inventor: Mark J. Jenkins
   • Assignee: Jentek Water Treatment, Inc.
   • Application No. US 16/927,400; filed 2020-07-13; granted 2022-08-02
   • Priority date: 2016-09-15 (provisional 62/395,185); continuation chain through US 10,126,284 and US 10,712,327, later continued as US 12,235,254 (app. 17/878,263)
   • Google Patents lists no "Cited By" third-party litigation and only Jentek's own continuation publication (US 2022/0373528 A1) citing it

3. Recommendation for a definitive answer: To confirm, a litigation search should be run directly against:

   • PACER (docket search on assignee "Jentek Water Treatment")
   • Unified Patents Portal (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist)
   • USPTO PTAB (for any IPR/PGR challenging the patent, and the PTAB "Patent Trial and Appeal Board Endpoint" API)
   • Docket Alarm / Lex Machina / Westlaw Litigation Analytics

If you'd like, I can attempt those specific database queries again on a follow-up pass.

Bottom line: On the evidence available, there is no known litigation involving US 11,402,363, and I cannot state with high confidence that none exists.

I'll verify the empty ODP result against public sources before reporting.

Let me run a couple more targeted checks against PTAB/litigation aggregators.

PTAB / AIA Trial Proceedings — US 11,402,363 B2

Verified 2026-09-29. Canonical source: USPTO Open Data Portal AIA trial proceedings API (structured block supplied with this task). Supplemental verification: Google Patents "Cited By" and litigation/PTAB references, Justia Patents assignee listing for Jentek Water Treatment, Inc., Docket Alarm PTAB index hits, Onscope IP-owner profile, and targeted web queries on the patent number, the title, the inventor, and the assignee combined with "IPR," "PTAB," "Patent Trial and Appeal Board," and "petition."

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Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 11,402,363: 0 — no IPRs, no PGRs, no CBMs. Breakdown by status is therefore all zero (0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution-denied), and the defensive posture is the opposite of the "hardened patent" scenario in the template: this is a wholly untested patent. All 19 claims sit exactly as they issued on 2022-08-02. There is no cancellation certificate, no FWD, no estoppel, and no PTAB record a defendant can borrow. Every claim-level invalidity argument is still unspent — and, importantly, so is every defense the patent owner might later need. Absence of PTAB activity is a signal about assertion history, not a validation of the claims: as the task template itself notes, well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs, and this one has attracted none.

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Per-proceeding sections

None to report. There are no proceeding numbers to enumerate, and I will not manufacture any. Specifically:

• No institution decisions exist (nothing to be "instituted," "denied," or "partially instituted").
• No Final Written Decisions exist, so there are no claim-level verdicts, no judge panels, and no quoted reasoning to attribute.
• No settlements or adverse-judgment terminations exist.
• No Federal Circuit appeals exist, because a PTAB appeal under 35 U.S.C. §§ 319/329 requires an underlying FWD.

What I actually checked, and what I found

One weak, non-dispositive signal worth logging for monitoring purposes: Pulsafeeder, Inc.'s application US20220025880A1 ("Method and system for operating a pump," priority 2020-07-24) appears in the "Cited By" list. That means a commercial pump vendor's application was examined against this patent family — i.e., a party whose product space overlaps claim 1's "injection pumps" limitation is on the record as having had this patent cited against it. This is not evidence of a filed IPR, a § 315(b)-triggering complaint, or even awareness of the patent by Pulsafeeder. But it is the single most plausible future petitioner profile, and it's the kind of entry a freedom-to-operate watch should track.

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Strategic summary

Claim status: 100% UNTESTED, 0% CANCELED. All claims stand as issued. The claim set is 19 claims with three independents — claim 1 (system: sensors + valves + injection pumps + local controller + servers + client portal, with closed-loop command execution at the controller), claim 9 (method: receive/store/compare at servers + downstream command to the controller to operate valves and injection pumps), and claim 17 (system: HVAC hydronic water reservoir + injection points + treatment chemical reservoirs + controller + servers + client portal). The five-axis "OPTI-GON" graph limitations live in claims 3 and 14 (solubility index, chemical residual, steel corrosion rate, copper corrosion rate, saturation index); claims 4–8, 10–13, 15, 16, 18 and 19 are dependents. No claim has been construed by the PTAB or by any district court that I could locate, so there is no Phillips-style PTAB construction, no institution-stage claim construction, and no Board precedent on the "local controller" versus "servers" split (claims 1 and 17) or on the "wherein the local controller is further operable to operate the one or more valves and the one or more injection pumps in response to the command" closing clause — which is the most technically meaty and most vulnerable-to-§ 103 limitation in the set.

Estoppel landscape: clean slate. Because no IPR/PGR was ever instituted, 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) estoppel does not attach to anyone. No petitioner, real party in interest, or privy has been estopped by an FWD. The corollary cuts both ways: there is no prior PTAB record for a defendant to inherit and no adverse Board validity finding for the patent owner to parade. A defendant today faces no restriction on which printed publications or patents it may raise, and the patent owner faces no narrowing that limits what it can assert. Meanwhile the statutory clocks matter more than the estoppel clock:

• PGR is unavailable. Post-grant review must be petitioned within 9 months of issuance (35 U.S.C. § 321(c)). Issuance was 2022-08-02, so the PGR window closed 2023-05-02. A § 112 or § 101-based AIA challenge is off the table; only the § 102/§ 103 printed-publications-and-patents channel of IPR remains.
• IPR remains fully available. There is no deadline running from issuance (35 U.S.C. § 311(c)). The only bar is the § 315(b) one-year clock from service of a complaint alleging infringement — and since no litigation appears to exist, no party is currently time-barred. If your client gets served, the 1-year § 315(b) countdown starts that day.
• § 325(d) discretion is live. Because the Office has never considered any art against this patent in an AIA setting, a petitioner is not disadvantaged by § 325(d)'s "same or substantially the same art previously presented" discretion — a real and underappreciated advantage over the typical second-challenger scenario.

Pattern signals. (1) No repeat-petitioner pattern — there is no petitioner at all, so no serial-attack dynamic. (2) No patent-owner PTAB appeal pattern — Jentek has not had to defend an FWD at the Federal Circuit; it has no appeal history on this family that I can find. (3) No defensive aggregator in the chain — I found no Unified Patents, RPX, or other aggregator involvement; nothing suggests this patent has been targeted as a "bad patent" of the type aggregators screen. (4) The family is being extended, not abandoned — the continuation chain runs US 15/706,478 → US 10,126,284 → US 16/186,986 → US 10,712,327 → US 16/927,400 → US 11,402,363 → continuation US 17/878,263 → US 12,235,254, which issued 2025-02-25. This matters strategically: the patent owner is building a thicket with the 2016-09-15 priority date and anticipated expiration out to 2037-09-15. Invalidating the '363 in an IPR does not clear the family — the '284, the '327, and now the '254 stand with the same specification. A defendant planning a PTAB campaign should scope the whole family, not just this member.

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Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant today:

1. Treat this as a virgin patent and attack it directly. No IPR has ever been filed, no claim has ever been construed, and no estoppel blocks anyone. The § 102/§ 103 field is wide open. The '363 issued with a prosecution record but no trial record — meaning the strongest art may well not have been before the examiner. Pull the file wrapper (US 16/927,400) and compare the examiner's cited references (34 citations listed, led by the Nalco, Betz Entec, Mogul, Santa Barbara Control Systems, and Hydronovation art) against what you can find.

2. Sequence the § 315(b) clock. No complaint appears to have been served on anyone. The moment one is, you have one year to petition (35 U.S.C. § 315(b)). Diarize it.

3. Focus the petition on the controller architecture, not the graph. The five-axis OPTI-GON claims (3, 14) carry distinctive design-around room; the commercially dangerous claims are 1, 9, and 17, which read on the closed-loop "local controller → servers → client portal → command back to controller → operate valves and injection pumps" architecture. That is a well-trodden SCADA/telemetry architecture, and early-1990s water telemetry art (e.g., the Mogul '757 telemetry system for water and energy monitoring, and Santa Barbara Control Systems' integrated water treatment control with probe failure detection, both already of record) may be augmentable.

4. Scope the whole family before you file. US 10,126,284, US 10,712,327, and US 12,235,254 share the 2016-09-15 priority date. A one-off IPR against the '363 that leaves the siblings standing buys you little.

If no PTAB activity is your answer (it is): say so plainly. There are zero AIA trial proceedings on US 11,402,363. No FWD to cite, no cancellation certificate to link, no Federal Circuit docket to quote. The absence is the finding — and it is a genuine signal that this patent has never been asserted with enough force to provoke a challenger, which in turn means its 19 claims are untested, not bulletproof.

Caveat on method (stated explicitly, per the no-fabrication constraint): the ODP AIA-trial endpoint is the canonical source here and it returned nothing. My web checks are corroborative only. General web search indexes PTAB papers imperfectly, and confidential settlements or recently filed (pre-institution, pre-publication) petitions can lag. For a litigation-grade opinion, confirm directly against USPTO PTAB E2E (https://e2e.uspto.gov) and the PTAB Endpoint API, and search on both the patent number and the parties "Jentek Water Treatment" / "Mark J. Jenkins." I cannot represent with certainty that no petition was filed in the last few weeks; I can represent that none is on file in the structured ODP data supplied for this analysis, and that none surfaced in any public source I queried.

Consistency check with prior sections: this is consistent with, and reinforces, the previously generated litigation summary (no litigation found) and the supplied PTAB block (no AIA trials on file). No contradiction between sections.

I'll research the assignment record for US 11,402,363, starting with the USPTO Assignment Center and cross-referencing legal events.

Let me search the USPTO assignment database records and cross-reference the assignee's corporate status.

Let me try to retrieve the actual reel/frame records and the correspondence attorney of record.

Ownership & Assignment Analysis — US 11,402,363 B2

Retrieval limitation up front: I was not able to complete a live query against USPTO Assignment Center (hit tool-call limit before the query resolved). The assignment record below is reconstructed from the Google Patents legal-events table in the authoritative patent text supplied to me, which reports a single ownership event, plus corroborating public sources on the assignee. I did not obtain a reel/frame number for any record, and I will not invent one. Treat the reel/frame fields as "not retrieved," not as "none exists."

Inventors

Pattern check: No unusual inventor pattern. There is a single inventor who is also the founder/owner of the assignee, so inventor "departure" and portfolio fire-sale precursors are not present. Jenkins is still listed as President/Owner of Jentek in the BOMA Dallas member directory (current listing, undated but live). This is the classic small-operating-company profile: founder-inventor assigns to his own company.

Original assignee

Jentek Water Treatment, Inc. (Dallas, Texas) — named as both original and current assignee on the face of the patent, and as Applicant/Assignee on the parent publications (US 2019/0079064 A1 shows "Applicant: Jentek Water Treatment, Inc., Dallas, TX").

• Line of business: Turnkey water treatment for HVAC, industrial and construction applications — water-treatment chemicals, service and monitoring equipment. SIC 2899 / NAICS 3259 (chemical preparations, NEC). HQ: 11524 Pagemill Rd, Dallas, TX 75243. Founded 1998.
• Product embodying the claims: Yes, on the evidence available. The specification itself describes the "X-SPECT Total Water Performance Centers" monitoring service and the "OPTI-GON" five-axis report as commercial offerings, and the specification pages carry a "© Copyright 2016 Jentek Water Treatment, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Confidential and proprietary" notice. Jentek also owns U.S. trademark registration 98046909 ("JENTEK WATER TREATMENT, INC.", filed 2023-06-16, registered 2023-11-14, Class 1, "chemicals for the treatment of cooling water systems") — i.e., it is actively selling branded goods in the same field.
• Current status: Operating, independent, privately held. Company-profile aggregators (SignalHire, Salary.com) list it as an independent company, 10–50 employees, estimated revenue $5–25M. I found no evidence of acquisition, merger, dissolution, or bankruptcy.

(Caveat: the size/revenue figures come from aggregator sites, not SEC filings — Jentek is private and files no 10-K/8-K, so there is no SEC cross-reference available for this chain.)

Assignment timeline

Channel check — USPTO Assignment Center: I could not retrieve the underlying reel/frame records in this pass. The authoritative patent text I was given contains only one ownership event for this application:

• 2020-07-13 (execution date not stated; date shown is the recording/legal-event date) — Reel not retrieved / Frame not retrieved
  • Conveyance: Assignment of assignor's interest ("ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)")
  • Assignor: JENKINS, MARK J.
  • Assignee: Jentek Water Treatment, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved — the Google Patents legal-event extract does not surface the correspondent field, and I could not reach Assignment Center to capture it. I therefore cannot run the repeat-correspondent test (Signal 3) on this chain.
  • Context: Contemporaneous/confirmatory inventor-to-employer assignment. It is dated on the same day as the filing of continuation application 16/927,400, moving rights from the founder-inventor to the operating company that already owned the two parent patents. Not a third-party transfer, not a fire-sale.

Notable gap: the earlier parent applications would be expected to carry their own recorded assignment from Jenkins to Jentek (circa 2017 for 15/706,478), but no such record is surfaced in the patent text I was given, and I could not verify one. This is a retrieval gap, not a finding that the record is absent. Similarly, the later continuation US 17/878,263 (issued as US 12,235,254, granted 2025-02-25) reports Jentek as assignee, but its separate assignment record was likewise not retrieved.

No post-issuance assignment, security interest, license, merger, change of name, or release appears anywhere in the record for US 11,402,363.

Per your instruction: the Assignment Center record could not be pulled directly, so I am reporting the single ownership event I can ground and flagging the reel/frame and correspondent as unresolved rather than stopping — there is at least one recorded link in the chain (inventor → company), so the "no records at all" branch does not apply.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 11402363
    2016 : Jenkins files provisional 62395185
         : Priority date fixed
    2017 : First application filed
         : Jentek named applicant and owner
    2018 : First continuation filed
    2020 : Second continuation filed
         : Jenkins assigns interest to Jentek
    2022 : US 11402363 granted Aug 2
         : Third continuation filed Aug 1
    2025 : Third continuation grants as US 12235254

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Score: 0 signals present, 1 unclear (correspondent not retrieved), 7 not present.

Verdict

Insufficient data.

The record contains only the original inventor-to-employer assignment (Jenkins → Jentek Water Treatment, Inc., event dated 2020-07-13 against app. 16/927,400; reel/frame not retrieved), which is precisely the fact pattern your rubric maps to Insufficient data — there is no post-issuance transfer record to evaluate. Stated affirmatively: I found no NPE-pattern evidence whatsoever. The patent sits with the same small, Dallas-based operating company that filed it, that sells branded water-treatment chemicals under a 2023 registration, that is the sole inventor's own company, and that (per the earlier litigation pass) has filed no infringement suits. That is a non-asserting operating company posture, but I decline to score it as "Operating-company assertion" because the assertion prong (suing actual competitors) is unmet on the current evidence.

Two items I would resolve on a follow-up pass to firm this up:

1. Pull the reel/frame and, critically, the correspondent of record from https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search by patent number 11402363 and by assignee "Jentek Water Treatment") to close out Signal 3.
2. Confirm whether the 2017 parent-application assignment (15/706,478) exists and whether it differs in correspondent — a 2017 and 2020 pair with the same correspondent would still be unremarkable here, since both links are Jenkins → his own company.

Verify the ownership record directly at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (also mirrored at the legacy https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html).

I'll verify key prior-art references against the authoritative patent record and enrich the citation analysis.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 11,402,363 B2

Scope and method. I identified US 11,402,363 literally as requested and worked from the citation lists printed in the authoritative Google Patents record for that exact number (https://patents.google.com/patent/US11402363/en). I ran live searches to verify the content of the highest-relevance references (Mogul, Santa Barbara Control Systems, Hydronovation, Sensicore, Betz Entec). I hit my tool-call ceiling before verifying every reference individually, so descriptions for the lower-tier references rely on the citation metadata in the patent record plus my own knowledge, and I flag that where relevant.

Two important framing points before the list:

1. Citation-count discrepancy (flagging as instructed). The record's own headings are inconsistent: one heading reads "Citations (34)" while a later heading reads "Patent Citations (35)." The enumerated list contains 34 U.S. entries; the 35th appears to be the applicant's own parent US 10,126,284 B1, which is listed separately at the tail of the list. This is an artifact of the record, not an error I have corrected.

2. §102 vs. §103 — the honest answer. Anticipation under §102 requires a single reference disclosing every element of a claim as arranged. None of the 34–35 references does that for any of the three independent claims (1, 9, 17), because the granted claims require the specific local-controller → server → client-portal architecture with the local controller (not the server) executing valve/pump commands. The genuinely relevant references are therefore best characterized as (a) strong §102 candidates for narrower dependent claims and (b) §103 combination art for the independent claims. I say so explicitly per reference rather than overstating anticipation.

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TIER 1 — Most relevant (closest art; single-reference candidates against the independent claims or their core elements)

1. US 4,830,757 A — The Mogul Corporation

• Title: Telemetry system for water and energy monitoring
• Filed / issued: 1985-08-06 / 1989-05-16 (continuation of Ser. No. 762,858, filed 1985-08-06)
• Description (verified via search): A plurality of remote stations, each with a water quality monitor computer (10) reading sensors (conductivity, pH, temperature, chemical concentration, water meter) and a management computer (20) interconnected with valves and pumps (22) — bleed valve, acid/caustic pumps, treatment chemical pumps, biocide pumps. The water quality computer compares each monitored physical property against a preselected range and adds chemicals automatically. A chemical inventory subsystem (36) tracks additive inventory via inventory transducers (24); an alarm (16) signals malfunction. A pollable memory (40) stores property levels, chemical addition/bleed data and chemical inventories; a modem (42) conveys data to a polling station (B), and stations are selectively accessed remotely from any telephone to monitor chemical inventories, reprogram set points and issue manual override commands.
• §102 potential: This is the single closest reference to claim 1. It discloses, in one reference: the sensors; the valves and pumps (arguably "injection pumps"); a controller/computer that collects data (the local architecture is split differently, which is the key distinction); the server (polling computer) comparing to target values and notifying on mismatch; and — notably — a status that includes valve/pump state and treatment-substance (chemical) inventory status, which maps onto claim 1's "state of each of the one or more valves and a status of each treatment substance reservoir." It is also highly relevant to claims 8, 9 and 10. The residual gap is the client portal / graphical interface and the "local controller executes the command" division of labor. Strong §102 candidate read narrowly; strong §103 primary reference read against claims 1/17.

2. US 5,895,565 A — Santa Barbara Control Systems

• Title: Integrated water treatment control system with probe failure detection
• Filed / issued: 1996-10-04 / 1999-04-20
• Description (verified): A microprocessor-based integrated control unit for a water source using sensors/probes (pH, ORP, conductivity, temperature, dissolved solids, filter clogging), chemical injection points (16), a bleed valve (20) and fill valve (22). It senses multiple physical characteristics, determines whether they are within or outside a given range, produces a first signal when outside, and treats the circulating water until the characteristic returns to range. It computes the Langelier saturation index from pH/temperature/alkalinity/hardness, provides a local display/control panel and a remote display/control accessed by modem that simulates the on-site panel so a central operator can control multiple remote systems.
• §102 potential: Very strong candidate for claim 17 (water reservoir + sensors + injection points + valves + controller + range comparison) and directly discloses the saturation-index element of claims 3, 5 and 14. Its remote-panel-over-modem disclosure bears on claim 9's "send subset to a client portal" and claim 1's client-portal display. Also supports claims 4 (actuators/valves) and 7 (treatment chemicals). Its accompanying continuation US 2002/0117430 A1 (Navarro) is cited in the same list and overlaps substantially. Residual gap vs. the granted claims: no server/client-portal cloud split; a single integrated unit performs both monitoring and control.

3. US 2014/0373926 A1 — Hydronovation, Inc.

• Title: Remote monitoring, control, and automatic analysis of water systems using internet-based software and databases
• Filed / published: 2013-01-22 (national stage of PCT/US2013/022482) / 2014-12-25; priority 2012-01-30
• Description (verified): A control system remotely reads a stream of measured data from a water-treatment process, analyzes it to determine operating parameters, compares measured parameters to target/desired parameters, produces an output response, and stores it; the database is communicated to a graphical user interface and a report to a remote client. It expressly discloses "controlling at least one operating parameter of the water treatment system by the at least one remote client based on the output response" and adjusting flow rate.
• §102 potential: Strong candidate for claim 9 (remote-read → compare → store → send to client portal including comparison results) and substantial portions of claim 1's server/client-portal functionality. Gap: irrigation/water-treatment hardware emphasis, with less explicit treatment of injection-pump/reservoir-status reporting as claimed.

4. US 4,464,315 A — Betz Entec, Inc.

• Title: Indexing controller system and method of automatic control of cooling water tower systems
• Filed / issued: 1982-12-20 / 1984-08-07
• Description (verified): Probes sense tower-water and make-up-water conductivity; a controller unit proportionally adjusts the blow-down trip point to maintain a predetermined Langelier's number, and controls bleed/replacement water and chemical feed pumps (66/68) and an automatic bleed valve (74); it displays system conditions and permits calibration.
• §102 potential: Element-level disclosure relevant to claims 1, 3, 5, 7, 8 and 17 (valves + chemical feed pumps + Langelier's-index control + automated range maintenance). Best used as §103 combination art, not standalone anticipation of an independent claim.

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TIER 2 — Moderate relevance (element-level disclosures; §103 combination art)

5. US 5,779,911 A — Irving M. Haug

• Title: Aqueous fluid purification monitoring and control system and process
• Filed / issued: 1996-04-10 / 1998-07-14
• Description: Monitoring and control of aqueous purification with sensors and control of treatment. §102 potential: element-level support for claims 1/9 (sensor data, monitoring/control loop); combination art.

6. US 2011/0304475 A1 — Hach Company

• Title: Server monitoring of flow and sampling apparatus and/or logger
• Filed / published: 2010-06-10 / 2011-12-15
• Description: Server-side monitoring of flow/sampling instruments and loggers. §102 potential: relevant to the "one or more servers" element of claims 1/9 and the data-logging/GUI aspects; §103 combination art.

7. US 2008/0109175 A1 — Sensicore, Inc.

• Title: Systems and methods for dynamic monitoring of fluid movement in a fluid distribution network using controlled concentration pulses of additives
• Filed / published: 2006-08-30 / 2008-05-08
• Description (verified): Additive concentration-pulse monitoring with data communicated to a computer system and graphical user interface displaying pipeline contours on a geographical map, with color-coded/shaded concentration levels and a time slider. §102 potential: relevant to claims 10 and 11 (map view, color coding) and to the GUI features of claims 2/13; §103 combination art.

8. CA 2630303 A1 — Sensicore, Inc. (family citation)

• Title: Systems and methods for fluid quality sensing, data sharing and data visualization
• Filed / published: 2005-11-16 / 2007-05-24
• Description: Fluid-quality sensor suite (ion-selective, amperometric, potentiometric, conductivity, temperature, ORP, chlorine, oxygen, optical), processing unit comparing measurements, communication unit sharing measurement results, and data visualization. §102 potential: relevant to claims 1/5 (sensor types + comparison) and the visualization claims (2, 13); §103 combination art.

9. US 2002/0067370 A1 — Paul W. Forney

• Title: Extensible manufacturing/process control information portal server
• Filed / published: 2000-09-15 / 2002-06-06
• Description: Portal-server architecture for process-control information. §102 potential: relevant to the "client portal" limitation of claims 1/17; §103 combination art for the portal/server elements.

10. US 2015/0291993 A1 — NCH Corporation

• Title: System and method for detecting biofilm growth in water systems
• Filed / published: 2014-04-09 / 2015-10-15
• Description: Biofilm/bacterial growth detection in water systems. §102 potential: relevant to the bacterial/legionella monitoring disclosed in the specification and to claim 6's "chemical, electrical, mechanical or other physical value" family; §103 combination art.

11. US 2017/0212536 A1 — Hayward Industries, Inc.

• Title: Systems and methods for providing network connectivity and remote monitoring, optimization, and control of pool/spa equipment
• Filed / published: 2016-01-22 / 2017-07-27
• Description: Networked remote monitoring and control of pool/spa water equipment (sensors, pumps, chemistry). §102 potential: note this reference has a 2016-01-22 priority — after US 11,402,363's 2016-09-15 priority, so it post-dates the priority date and is not prior art to the claims (it is a "Cited By"/family-context citation only if its earlier priority were relied upon; as listed its date is 2016-01-22). Relevant only as analogous-technology context for claims 1/17 remote control.

12. US 2013/0048745 A1 — Thermodynamic Process Control, LLC

• Title: Modulation control of hydronic systems
• Filed / published: 2007-01-26 / 2013-02-28
• Description: Modulation control for hydronic systems. §102 potential: relevant to the "HVAC hydronic water system" context of claim 17; §103 combination art for the hydronic setting.

13. US 2014/0048244 A1 — Albert Reid Wallace

• Title: Hydronic building systems control
• Filed / published: 2012-08-17 / 2014-02-20
• Description: Control of hydronic building systems. §102 potential: hydronic-system context for claim 17; §103 combination art.

14. US 2010/0245103 A1 — Pvt Solar, Inc.

• Title: Healthy home graphical user interface method and device
• Filed / published: 2009-03-31 / 2010-09-30
• Description: GUI for home-system monitoring (cited by the examiner). §102 potential: relevant to the graphical-interface / status-indicator limitations of claims 2, 10, 11, 13; §103 combination art.

15. US 2008/0202216 A1 — Mark A. Campbell

• Title: System and method for monitoring and/or controlling attributes of multiple chemical mixtures with a single sensor
• Filed / published: 1999-08-03 / 2008-08-28
• Description: Monitoring/controlling multiple chemical mixtures via a single sensor. §102 potential: relevant to the sensor + chemical-concentration aspects of claims 1, 5, 6; §103 combination art.

16. US 2008/0314807 A1 — Max Rudolf Junghanns

• Title: Systems and methods for treating water
• Filed / published: 2005-09-23 / 2008-12-25
• Description: Water-treatment systems and methods. §102 potential: general treatment-system context for claims 1/12/17; §103 combination art.

17. US 2003/0116487 A1 — Cristopher Petersen

• Title: Automated fluid filtration system for conducting separation processes, and for acquiring and recording data thereabout
• Filed / published: 2001-10-09 / 2003-06-26
• Description: Automated fluid filtration with data acquisition/recording. §102 potential: relevant to automated fluid handling + data acquisition elements of claims 1/9; §103 combination art.

18. US 2014/0113819 A1 — Water Star, Inc. (examiner-cited)

• Title: High pressure dissolved oxygen generation
• Filed / published: 2012-08-31 / 2014-04-24
• Description: Dissolved-oxygen generation for water treatment. §102 potential: peripherally relevant to water-treatment hardware; weak §103 support.

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TIER 3 — Background / peripheral (cited for general display, computing or water-chemistry context; not close to the claimed architecture)

Not prior art in the strict sense — but listed in the record:

• US 10,126,284 B1 (Jentek Water Treatment, Inc.; 2016-09-15 / 2018-11-13) — the applicant's own parent patent in the same family (app. 15/706,478). Listed as a citation at the tail of the list; it is a same-family reference, not independent prior art.
• US 2017/0212536 A1 (Hayward) and US 2014/... family members with post-2016-09-15 effective dates — verify effective prior-art dates before relying on them.

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Bottom line on the strongest §102 matches

No single reference anticipates claims 1, 9 or 17 in full, because each lacks at least the local-controller → server → client-portal division of labor (and, for most, the "local controller executes the command" limitation). The realistic validity challenge is a §103 combination: e.g., Mogul (US 4,830,757) or Santa Barbara (US 5,895,565) in view of Hydronovation (US 2014/0373926 A1) and a portal/GUI reference (Forney US 2002/0067370 A1, Suzuki US 2002/0072922 A1, or Pvt Solar US 2010/0245103 A1) to supply the client portal and cloud/server architecture.

Caveats (stated honestly)

• I verified the substance of Mogul, Santa Barbara, Hydronovation, Sensicore and Betz Entec via live search; the remaining references are characterized from the patent record's citation metadata and my own knowledge and were not individually re-verified in this pass — descriptions for Tier 3 should be spot-checked before being relied upon.
• References bearing post-2016-09-15 dates (e.g., Hayward US 2017/0212536 A1) must be checked for earlier priority before use as prior art.
• The citation-count discrepancy ("34" vs. "35") is reproduced, not corrected, per the operating rule that identifiers/counts be read literally.
• No litigation, IPR/PGR or Federal Circuit proceeding specifically naming US 11,402,363 surfaced in prior analysis; that finding is unchanged and should be confirmed against PACER/PTAB directly.

I'll ground this obviousness analysis in the prior-art references listed on this patent's face. Let me verify the disclosures of the key references before building combinations.

Good grounding. Let me verify the remaining references relevant to the dependent claims (five-axis graph, bacterial monitoring, server-based reporting).

I was unable to run my final verification batch (tool limit reached), so the analysis below relies on (a) the full granted text and the citation list on the face of US 11,402,363, and (b) verified disclosure text for the five references I did retrieve: Hydronovation US 2014/0373926 A1, Santa Barbara Control Systems US 5,895,565, Betz Entec US 4,464,315, Sensicore US 2008/0109175 A1, and Hayward US 2017/0212536 A1. For the remaining cited references I rely on their listed title/assignee/date only and flag that limitation explicitly.

Obviousness analysis — US 11,402,363 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

0. Framing and the person of ordinary skill

POSITA: a bachelor's degree in chemical, mechanical, or electrical engineering (or equivalent) plus roughly 2–5 years' experience in industrial water-treatment monitoring and control — comfortable with sensors/probes, PLCs and local control panels, chemical feed pumps and solenoid/actuated valves, networked telemetry, and web/cloud dashboards. This mirrors the background of the named references (Betz Entec, Mogul, Santa Barbara Control Systems, Nalco, Hach, Hydronovation).

Method: element-by-element mapping against the § 103 Graham factors, with explicit KSR rationales. The single most important structural observation is that the granted claims differ materially from the specification's BRIEF SUMMARY (as flagged in the earlier section): the claims add (i) a local controller that is distinct from the server(s) and (ii) a server-generated status that bundles fluid properties + valve state + treatment-reservoir status.

Critical prior-art-date point for Hayward. US 2017/0212536 A1 (Potucek/Hayward) published 2017-07-27 (after Jentek's 2016-09-15 provisional), but its effective U.S. filing date is 2016-01-22 (provisional 62/286,272). It therefore qualifies as § 102(a)(2) prior art (U.S. application publication effectively filed before Jentek's effective filing date), not merely as a post-filing publication. This matters, because Hayward is the closest art on the "local control subsystem ↔ cloud server ↔ remote user command" architecture.

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1. Claim 1 — the three "hardware" independent claims at a glance

1.1 Primary combination for claim 1: Hydronovation '926 + Santa Barbara '565 + Betz '315, optionally + Hayward '536

• Hydronovation '926 supplies the entire supervisory layer: remote reading of water-treatment data, comparison to a target operating parameter, generation and storage of an "output response," a database, a remote client, a graphical user interface, and — critically — remote control of an operating parameter by the remote client, plus monitoring of remaining cartridge capacity (a reservoir-status analogue). Its specification even recites LSI and predictive/adaptive control. On its face this reads on the "server + client portal + compare/notify + remote command" elements.
• Santa Barbara '565 supplies the local, integrated control unit that unifies sensing and chemical/mechanical treatment at the site, computes the Langelier saturation index from pH/temperature/alkalinity/hardness, and provides both a local display/control and a remote display/control that mimics the on-site panel. This is the "local controller coupled to sensors … operable to operate valves and pumps" element, and it teaches the local/remote division of labor.
• Betz '315 supplies the valve + injection-pump + treatment-reservoir hardware and the closed-loop control philosophy: conductivity probes feed a controller that (a) opens/closes the bleed valve and (b) runs chemical-feed pumps to maintain a predetermined Langelier's number (i.e., "maintain a fluid property within a predetermined range," claim 8).
• Hayward '536 supplies the modern IoT architecture: a local control subsystem/hub at the equipment, a remote server holding control logic, remote user devices, valve actuators and valve-position sensing, and chemistry automation — i.e., server-formulated command, local execution.

Motivation to combine (KSR):

1. Same field, same problem. Hydronovation's own background states the problem verbatim: monitoring is too often "physically on site … retro-active, rather than pro-active," and it seeks real-time remote monitoring to cut service visits. Santa Barbara's stated objective is identical ("access the control unit remotely by modem and computer … for the purpose of monitoring and control from a remote location"). Combining a remote-monitoring platform with an in-place integrated water-treatment controller is the definition of "improving a known device by a known technique in the same field."
2. Complementary, non-overlapping strengths. Hydronovation is thin on the physical valve/pump/reservoir hardware; Betz and Santa Barbara are rich on it but limited to local/modem control. A POSITA seeking remote control of a chemical-treatment loop would predictably marry the two.
3. Design choice / predictable result. Putting the local panel's LSI/chemical logic behind an internet-facing server and dashboard yields nothing more than the expected aggregate of each reference's function.
4. Market and infrastructure pressures (cloud, IoT, reducing truck rolls) supply the "reason to improve" that KSR endorses.

1.2 Honest counterpoint (where claim 1 is strongest)

The claim's arguably novel kernel is the server-generated atomic "status" object = {sensed properties} + {state of each valve} + {status of each treatment-substance reservoir}. Whether this is genuinely distinguishing depends on claim construction:

• Under the broadest reasonable reading, Hydronovation's "remaining cartridge capacity" satisfies "status of each treatment substance reservoir," and Hayward's valve-position sensing satisfies "state of each valve." If so, the element is disclosed/obvious.
• If the patentee persuades a court that "status of each reservoir" requires live reservoir-level/chemistry rather than cartridge remaining-life, and that "state of each valve" requires reported open/closed status, the element becomes narrower — but it is still a predictable aggregation of two known telemetry values, which KSR treats as obvious absent unexpected results.

Net: claim 1 is vulnerable, with a genuine but modest defense centered on the bundled status object and the server/local-controller split.

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2. Claim 9 — method counterpart

Claim 9 tracks claim 1 in method form (receive data from the local controller; receive valve/injection-pump status; store; compare to predetermined values; send the requested subset including comparison results to a client portal; local controller receives the user command and operates the valves/pumps). Same combination applies, and the method framing makes it easier, not harder, to invalidate: KSR treats method claims that recite the operational steps of a known system as obvious where the references perform those steps. Hydronovation literally performs the "remotely read … compare … produce an output response … communicate to remote client" method; Betz/Santa Barbara perform the local actuation; Hayward performs the server→hub→device command path.

Note the drafting irregularity flagged earlier ("a at least one fluid") — it is a clarity issue, not a saving limitation.

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3. Claim 17 — HVAC-hydronic-specific system

Claim 17 is the most hardware-specific but, in my view, also vulnerable, because its added structure is the classical water-treatment loop:

Hydronic refinement: the "HVAC hydronic" flavor is supplied by the cited class art — Thermodynamic Process Control US 2013/0048745 A1 (modulation control of hydronic systems), Wallace US 2014/0048244 A1 (hydronic building-systems control), and Honeywell US 8,024,161 B2 (model-based multivariable balancing for distributed hydronic networks). A cooling tower / closed-loop water-treatment system (Betz, Santa Barbara) is within the claim's "HVAC hydronic water system" scope, so these are complementary, not necessary.

Caveat: I verified the disclosure text of Betz '315, Santa Barbara '565, Hydronovation '926 and Hayward '536, but for US 2013/0048745, US 2014/0048244 and US 8,024,161 I am relying on the titles/assignees listed on the face of US 11,402,363. Confirm their disclosures before relying on them in a validity opinion.

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4. The dependent claims

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5. Motivation-to-combine summary (KSR rationales invoked)

• Predictable result from known elements (§ 103; KSR): remote-monitoring server + integrated local water-treatment controller + chemical-feed/valve hardware = the expected union of their functions.
• Simple substitution of a known architecture: replacing a modem/local panel (Santa Barbara) with an internet server + portal + IoT hub (Hydronovation, Hayward) is a known upgrade path in the same field.
• Known technique to improve a similar device: applying cloud dashboards/alarm maps to water-treatment controllers as done for pools/spas (Hayward) and building systems (Pvt Solar, Honeywell).
• "Obvious to try": the references converge on the same problem (proactive, remote water-system management), and the solution space was small and well-trodden.
• Reasonable expectation of success: each building block was separately proven in commercial water-treatment control, so aggregation carried low technical risk.

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6. What the record tells us, and the honest limits of this opinion

1. The examiner already had most of these references. US 5,895,565; US 4,464,315; US 2014/0373926; US 2011/0304475; US 2008/0109175; and US 2017/0212536 all appear in the "Citations" list on the face of US 11,402,363. Allowance therefore implies the examiner viewed the specific claimed combination (local controller + server-generated valve/reservoir status + the OPTI-GON) as not taught. An obviousness challenge must attack that specific combination; a generic "these are all water-treatment references" argument will not carry the day.
2. The strongest invalidity theory is structural, not parametric: Hyrdonovation '926 (server comparison + remote-client control + reservoir/cartridge status) + Hayward '536 (server→local-hub→actuator execution + valve-position sensing) together come close to every limitation of claim 1/9/17 except the precise wording of the "status" object and the five-axis graph of claims 3/14.
3. Weakest spot for the challenger: claims 3/14 (the OPTI-GON). The constituent chemistry is old, but the specific five-axis selection + pentagonal layout + threshold/target/actual rings is the kind of concrete, non-generic presentation a patentee can argue was not obvious. Consider designing around or challenging that claim separately.
4. Related (non-§ 103) risk to flag: because US 11,402,363 and its family members (US 10,126,284; US 10,712,327; US 12,235,254) share a 2016-09-15 priority and overlapping disclosure, the family also raises obviousness-type double patenting exposure if the claims differ only in scope without a terminal disclaimer. That is outside the § 103 question you asked, but worth noting in any validity study.
5. Verification gaps. I could not independently review the full text of US 4,041,466, US 4,830,757, US 2011/0304475, US 2015/0291993, US 2010/0245103, WO 2008/157498, US 8,024,161, US 2013/0048745, or US 2014/0048244 before exhausting my search budget; for those I rely solely on the titles/assignees/dates listed on the face of US 11,402,363. Those are the references whose actual disclosures should be pulled and read before committing to any assertion in a formal validity opinion, particularly for the maintenance-schedule (15/16), map (10/11) and multi-axis-display (3/14) limitations.

Bottom line: Independent claims 1, 9 and 17 are reasonably likely to be obvious over a combination of Hydronovation US 2014/0373926 A1 (with § 102(a)(2) Hayward US 2017/0212536 A1) as the supervisory/remote-control layer, Santa Barbara US 5,895,565 as the integrated local controller, and Betz Entec US 4,464,315 as the valve/injection-pump/treatment-reservoir hardware — with the "status" reporting and OPTI-GON (claims 3, 14) being the patentee's principal — though not necessarily sufficient — non-obviousness arguments.