One assignee leads clearly with 287 of the 961 records in scope, well ahead of the fifth-place holder at 21. The top five assignees combined hold 65.6% of all records, and the top ten hold 74.8%, so this is a field where a small number of engine OEMs and coating specialists control most of the claim space. A newcomer should expect to design around, or license from, one of these established portfolios rather than file into open ground on the core mechanical concepts.

Filings peaked at 59 records in 2019 and had fallen to 15 by 2024, down 38% from the 24 filed in 2021. That 2021-to-2024 window is the most recent period the dataset can treat as complete, since publication typically lags actual filing by about 18 months. Figures for 2025 and 2026 will rise as those publications catch up, so the apparent recent drop should not be read as the field going quiet.

An abradable coating is a sacrificial layer applied to the casing or shroud that wears away preferentially when a blade tip rubs against it, protecting the blade and controlling the running clearance. A squealer tip is a thin-walled feature machined into the blade tip itself, often with internal cavities, that reduces the contact area and tip leakage vortex losses during any rub incursion. Both approaches appear throughout this dataset, frequently in the same records, because engine designs commonly combine a squealer-tip blade with an abradable casing coating to manage clearance and leakage together.