Turbine Blade Internal Cooling Patents: Who Leads, Where the Gaps Are 2026
- 52.1% of the field sits with the top five assignees out of 674 records in scope — a tight core, not a fragmented one.
- Filings peaked in 2017 at 52 and fell sharply into 2021-2024, though the last two years are still filling in under publication lag.
- 88.1% of records carry an F01D turbine classification, but additive manufacturing (B33Y) and heat-exchanger detail (F28F) classes remain thin — under 3% each.
Filing growth compares 2021 (35 records) with 2024 (2) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 674 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this dataset covers
This landscape tracks 674 published patent records at the intersection of internal cooling architectures for turbine blades — serpentine passages, rib turbulators, pin fin arrays, impingement cooling, coolant flow splits, trailing edge slots, dust holes and heat transfer coefficient claims — filed or published between 2015 and mid-2026. The search string pairs a structural cooling term with a flow or thermal-performance term, so the corpus captures claims that combine a specific passage geometry with a specific cooling mechanism, rather than generic turbine blade filings.
Ownership of this space is concentrated: the ranked leaders account for the majority of filings, and the top ten alone cover almost three-quarters of all records. That concentration matters for a design-around search — it means most of the load-bearing prior art sits with a small number of assignees, and the long tail below them is where single-filing entrants and licensing targets are more likely to be found.
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Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 674 records: how filing volume has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses the claims actually sit in.
Filing trend: a sharp rise-and-fall pattern
Filings rose to a peak of 52 in 2017, then declined through the early 2020s. From 2021 to 2024 — the most recent year that can be treated as complete — filings fell 94%, from 35 to 2. The 2025-2026 figures are not yet reliable signals of a continued decline, since publication typically lags filing by around 18 months; they simply have not finished arriving.
IPC composition: concentrated in the core turbine class
F01D (turbines and non-positive-displacement engines) covers 88.1% of the 674 records, confirming this is squarely a core-turbine cooling dataset rather than an adjacent-technology one. F02C (gas-turbine plants) and F23R (combustion chambers) follow at 11.7% and 7.4%. Manufacturing-adjacent classes — foundry moulding (B22C, 4.0%), powder metallurgy (B22F, 2.7%), general metal working (B23P, 1.9%) and additive manufacturing (B33Y, 1.9%) — are each present but thin, which is where process-integration claims are least contested.
Shares are the percentage of the 674 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Turbine Blade Internal Cooling with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about turbine blade internal cooling and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaRepresentative and most-cited records
Cooled turbine blade and method for cooling a turbine blade
A cooled turbine blade comprises a root for fixing the blade to a rotor, an airfoil extending along a radial axis from the root, and a tip shroud disposed at a radially outward end of the airfoil. The tip shroud extends circumferentially from the airfoil and defines a core plenum and a peripheral plenum within itself. The airfoil defines an aft airfoil cooling passage extending radially near the trailing edge, fed by a dedicated aft cooling inlet, with at least one aft cooling exit discharging the aft cooling stream.Filed by GE Infrastructure Technology; illustrates the split-plenum tip shroud approach common to trailing-edge cooling claims in this dataset.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US5813835A | Air-cooled turbine blade | 314 |
| 2 | US20160221262A1 | Systems and methods for fabricating three-dimensional objects | 226 |
| 3 | US6974308B2 | High effectiveness cooled turbine vane or blade | 189 |
| 4 | US5328331A | Turbine airfoil with double shell outer wall | 181 |
| 5 | US4940388A | Cooling of turbine blades | 156 |
| 6 | US5533864A | Turbine cooling blade having inner hollow structure with improved cooling | 154 |
| 7 | US4650399A | Rotor blade for a rotary machine | 143 |
| 8 | US5624231A | Cooled turbine blade for a gas turbine | 127 |
| 9 | US4487550A | Cooled turbine blade tip closure | 125 |
| 10 | US5484258A | Turbine airfoil with convectively cooled double shell outer wall | 121 |
Citation counts reflect influence within the searched corpus and skew toward older filings; they are not a measure of current commercial relevance.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Browse MCP servers →What the numbers mean for a filing decision
Three read-outs from the concentration, trend and classification data that bear directly on where to file and where to expect resistance.
The core claim space has few owners
Just five assignees account for 52.1% of the 674 records in scope, and the top ten extend that to 72.0%. A freedom-to-operate search in serpentine passage or rib turbulator geometry will run into the same handful of portfolios repeatedly rather than a dispersed field.
Volume has dropped, but read the tail carefully
Filings fell from 35 in 2021 to 2 in 2024 — a genuine slowdown by the last complete year. The leading assignees in this dataset each show zero filings in the most recent year tracked, which is consistent with either a real pause in filing activity or simply publication lag still catching up.
Core turbine claims dominate; manufacturing classes are thin
F01D carries the overwhelming majority of records, but additive manufacturing (B33Y, 1.9%) and heat-exchanger detail (F28F, 2.2%) are each present in under two dozen records. That combination — dense core claims, thin process claims — is where a narrowly drafted manufacturing-integration claim is least likely to collide with existing art.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to turbine blade internal cooling, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who holds the ground, and where it thins out
The ranked leaders hold the bulk of the volume, but the composition data points to specific sub-areas where filing density is still low.
A clear leader, then a steep drop to fifth
The top-ranked assignee holds 103 records; by fifth place that figure has fallen to 42, and by tenth place to 20. The gap between first and fifth is itself a signal — this is a field with one dominant portfolio rather than a tight cluster of equals at the top.
Co-assignment is rare and mostly intra-group
Only five co-assignee pairs appear across the dataset, and the strongest link is between two entities under the same corporate parent. Cross-company joint filing is not a meaningful pattern here — most claims are filed by a single entity.
Momentum has stalled across the board
Every one of the leading assignees tracked for recent-year momentum shows zero filings in the latest year captured. Given the 18-month publication lag, this understates true 2025-2026 activity, but it also means the visible pipeline from the largest holders has gone quiet for now.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| United Technologies Corp | 0 | — |
| General Electric Co | 0 | — |
| Honeywell International Inc | 0 | — |
| Florida Turbine Technologies Inc | 0 | — |
| RTX Corp | 0 | — |
| Siemens AG | 0 | — |
| Rolls-Royce plc | 0 | — |
| Solar Turbines Inc | 0 | — |
Where to take this from here
The landscape data points to two practical next steps: checking a specific claim against the dominant prior art, and testing draft language against the thinner sub-areas before committing to a filing strategy.
Run a freedom-to-operate check against the leading portfolios
With over half the field held by five assignees, a design-around search should start with their claim families rather than a broad prior-art sweep.
Explore assignee portfolios in Eureka →Draft into the thinner manufacturing classes
Additive manufacturing and heat-exchanger detail claims sit well below 5% of records — draft language there before the space fills in.
Test claim language in Eureka →Common questions about this landscape
Ownership in this dataset is concentrated: the top five assignees among the 54 ranked companies account for 52.1% of the 674 records in scope, and the leading assignee alone holds 103 records. That said, the field is not a single-company monopoly — by tenth place, holdings drop to 20 records, showing a long tail of smaller filers below the concentrated top. Anyone doing competitive tracking should watch the leader's continuation filings closely, since that portfolio is disproportionately large relative to the rest of the ranking.
Filings peaked at 52 in 2017 and fell to 2 by 2024, a 94% decline over the 2021-2024 span for which the data is considered complete. This does not necessarily mean the underlying R&D has slowed to the same degree — patent publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, so the 2025 and 2026 figures in this dataset are still incomplete and should not be read as continued decline. A more likely explanation is that core geometric claims in serpentine passages and rib turbulators have already been heavily filed, pushing new work toward narrower process or manufacturing claims that may not show up as strongly in this specific search string.
The overwhelming majority of records, 88.1% of 674, fall under IPC class F01D covering turbines and non-positive-displacement engines. Secondary classes include F02C for gas-turbine plants at 11.7% and F23R for combustion chambers at 7.4%, reflecting how cooling claims often extend into the surrounding engine architecture. Manufacturing-related classes such as additive manufacturing (B33Y) and powder metallurgy (B22F) each appear in under 3% of records, marking them as comparatively under-claimed relative to the core turbine classification.
The core geometric and thermal-performance claims — serpentine passages, pin fin arrays, impingement cooling — sit on dense prior art given how concentrated the top assignees are. However, classification data shows several adjacent branches remain thin: additive-manufactured cooling cores, heat-exchanger-integrated trailing edge features, and powder-metallurgy preform processes each account for under 3% of the 674 records. These process-integration angles are a more realistic place to file a defensible new claim than the well-trodden passage-geometry space.
This GE-assigned record describes a cooled turbine blade with a tip shroud defining separate core and peripheral plenums, and an aft airfoil cooling passage near the trailing edge fed by a dedicated cooling inlet and exit. It is representative of the trailing-edge, split-plenum cooling approach common across many records in this dataset rather than a singular blocking claim. Anyone filing near trailing-edge cooling architecture should review its specific plenum and passage structure closely, but the wider corpus shows many independently filed variations on the same general theme, meaning design-around room exists in the specific geometry and flow-routing details.
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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.