Rolls-Royce has been a major player in the last century of civil aviation since the beginning; it was Rolls-Royce Eagle engines that powered the Vickers Vimy that carried Alcock and Brown across the Atlantic in 1919.
Since then, the company has continued to pioneer the power of flight. Today, an aircraft powered by the Trent family of engines takes off or lands every 13 seconds.
For jet engines to work – lifting an aircraft weighing more than a hundred thousand pounds into the air – it requires precise design and manufacture that is measured in microns - to the thickness of a human hair.
In short, everything has to be exactly right. Every single piece. Every time.
Consider the set of bolts on the Trent XWB. They’re strong enough to safely bear the weight of two fully loaded A380s. No small feat. Or think about this: upon take-off, just one of the high-pressure Trent 1000 turbine blades generates the same horsepower as a Formula 1 car.
Those are just two components out of the 18,000 distinct parts in Rolls-Royce’s Trent engines – which together make up around a third of the chemical elements in the periodic table.
With more than 3,600 Trent engines currently in service, the innovation doesn’t stop at design. Nearly a third of the world’s widebody fleet rely on Trent engines for power, so innovative approaches to services help to maximise flying time.
For example, Rolls-Royce is developing a ‘snake’ robot that can work its way through an engine like an endoscope to deposit smaller SWARM robots that crawl through the insides of the engine and perform a visual inspection of hard-to-reach areas.
This can help predict and speed up engine maintenance, delivering a raft of operational benefits – such as removing the need to take an engine off the aircraft to perform maintenance work – as well as cost savings to the airline.